Fierce Biotech
When it comes to the development of new painkillers, the placebo effect is a powerful and astonishing force. It is already known that expectation alone can be enough to relieve pain, even if the “treatment” is a deception with no real pharmacological effect. Although the relief provided by a placebo can be enough to cause clinical trials for new pain medications to fail, it is largely unexplained how our brains induce such strong pain relief through belief alone.
Now researchers have succeeded in investigating the neural circuits responsible for placebo pain relief in mice. They found that the effect is controlled by parts of the brain that were previously thought to play an important role in pain processing. The results were published in the July 24 issue of the journal Nature.
In this article, Prof. Dr. Ulrike Bingel commented on this exciting new publication by Chen and colleagues. We are very pleased that Prof. Dr. Dagmar Timmann-Braun as the new project leader of A17 will investigate exactly this in humans using high-resolution (7 Tesla) magnetic resonance imaging in the 2nd funding phase of the CRC.
You can read the full article here and the original publication here.