Cellectricon, a collaborative services provider dedicated to advancing drug discovery and research in the areas of chronic pain and neurodegenerative diseases, has announced the launch of a services offering for exploration of the role of neuroinflammation in chronic pain.
It is widely agreed that communication between neurons and the immune system is involved in the chronification of pain. At each anatomical level of the nervous system, immune cells mediate dysfunction in the sensory circuitry. For example, in the spinal cord, inflammatory mediators released from microglia can increase the efficacy of synaptic transmission, contributing to the experience of pain.
“As more details become known about how inflammatory mediators affect chronification of pain, it may be possible to design novel pharmacological as well as non-pharmacological interventions that block disease progression. For example, great progress is being made with bone marrow stromal cells that seem to inhibit neuropathic pain via secretion of anti-inflammatory cytokines”, said Dr Paul Karila, CSO and Director of Chronic Pain research at Cellectricon.
With eight years of experience in peripheral and central pain research, Cellectricon offers fully validated in vitro disease models including human iPSC-derived neuronal cultures, cell lines and native neuronal cultures. The company’s expertise and proprietary discovery platform allows Clients to better prioritize which molecules to advance into the clinic, and it has undertaken numerous successful research projects for life science clients.
In this new offering, Cellectricon will grant Clients long-term partnerships focusing on the development of novel in vitro models to better understand the mechanisms and factors involved in the chronification of pain, and to find compounds with novel mechanisms of action using the company’s high capacity discovery platform.
“We are very excited to increase our involvement in this field, in particular because neuroinflammatory pain and neurodegenerative diseases have many things in common that will lead to synergies in our research portfolio of disease models for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS”, Dr Karila added.