Rays of blue light to stop the pain – Biotech

A beam of blue light to stop pain: this is the "strategy" successfully tested by researchers from the University of Milan and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) of Genoa to relieve pain from of the nervous system (neuropathic). Described in the journal Nature Methods and tested in mice, the technique showed that it was sufficient to expose the animals for one minute to a flash of blue light to activate the protein and relieve the pain for half a minute. hour.

The protein that responds to light calls BLINK2 and can block the activity of neurons. The same state group, led by Anna Moroni, had developed in 2015 BLINK11, a protein of viral origin combined with a vegetable protein, which however functioned in some animals but not in mammals. That's why the researchers got the BLINK2 protein, which "is able to inhibit neuronal activity in the mammalian brain, an effect that lasts for several minutes in the dark," says Raffaella Tonini, one of the researchers.

Which, adds Moroni, "makes it particularly suitable for the control of persistent neuronal hyper-excitability (ie, the excessive reaction of neurons), as in the case of chronic pain" . In a rat exposed for one minute to a blue light source, BLINK2 managed to relieve the pain for more than half an hour.