XClose

Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research

Home
Menu

FAAH-OUT! A new pain insensitivity gene

FAAH-OUT! A new pain insensitivity gene (Dr. James Cox, Nociception Lab, WIBR, UCL)

Photo of James Cox

Millions of people worldwide are living in chronic pain. This pain is often poorly treated and the over-prescription of opioid-based drugs has contributed to an opioid epidemic that is causing significant morbidity and mortality. New pain-killing and non-opioid based medications are hence urgently needed. A powerful way to identify novel human-validated analgesic drug targets is to study rare individuals with intact damage-sensing neurons that present with a congenital pain insensitive phenotype. Here I will describe a new pain insensitivity disorder in which a female patient carries both a hypomorphic SNP in the fatty-acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) gene and a microdeletion downstream of FAAH in a novel gene called FAAH-OUT. This patient, in addition to being pain insensitive, also presents with additional clinical symptoms including a happy, non-anxious disposition, enhanced wound healing, reduced stress and fear symptoms and mild memory deficits. I will describe recent gene editing and CRISPR interference experiments that reveal the importance of the FAAH-OUT genomic region to normal FAAH expression. Our results highlight the potential of gene therapy targeting FAAH/FAAH-OUT for the development of novel non-opioid based analgesics.