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Modern Pain Therapies For Pain Management Essay

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1 Introduction

Despite all the advances erupting from therapeutic research, current treatments for pain management remain inadequate. The efficacies of modern pain therapies are challenged by “adverse tolerability profiles, unfavourable side effects, concerns with long-tern use and potential for misuse or abuse” (Carven & Roberts, 2013). While the major analgesic medicines on the market today include “narcotic (opioids) and non-narcotic analgesics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and heat therapy” (Carven & Roberts, 2013), engineered biologics are emerging as a promising approach to reconcile various inadequacies of existing pain therapies, since they can be manufactured with capacities such as target specificity to minimize unnecessary, adverse reactivity.
Utilizing recombinant DNA technology, our iGEM team hopes to produce the functional mambalgin-1 protein, which is naturally derived from the venom of Dendroaspis polylepis, commonly referred to as the African Black Mamba. Mambalgins have been characterized with a strong potential to be useful in the treatment of acute and chronic pain, since the mechanism of action for this protein is independent of the opioid pathway – meaning that it likely non-addictive by its properties – and is as potent as morphine, without building tolerance (Diochot, Baron, Salinas, Douguet, Scarzello, Dabert-Gay, Debayle, Friend, Alloui, Lazdunski, & Lingueglia, 2012). Escherichia coli was chosen as the chassis organism for the

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