Chronic pain affects a third of the population and current treatments produce limited relief and severe side effects. An alternative strategy to decrease pain would be to directly modulate somatosensory pathways using optogenetics. Optogenetics involves the use of genetically encoded and optically active proteins, namely opsins, to control neuronal circuits. In preclinical animal models, optical silencing of peripheral nociceptors has been shown to alleviate both inflammatory and neuropathic pain. An opsin-based gene therapy to treat chronic pain patients is not ready yet, but encouraging advances have been made in optical and viral technology. In view of the increasing burden of chronic pain in our aging society, innovative analgesic approaches based on optogenetics are definitely worth exploring.
Keywords: analgesia; chronic pain; gene therapy; opsin; optogenetics; phototherapy; somatosensory system; virus.