Consider this scenario: A patient is home recovering from knee surgery to repair an ACL tear. Her pain medications are wearing off, and the surgical cuts are starting to throb. Reaching over to the table she picks up what’s essentially a souped-up laser pointer, points it at the surgical wound and turns it on. Within seconds, the pain starts to fade.
This picture isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. In a pair of simultaneous papers, Boston Children’s Hospital’s Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, and his laboratory recently reported their efforts to create not one, but two methods for packaging long-lasting local anesthetics in microspheres that could be injected in advance by a surgeon or anesthesiologist and that would release the drugs when zapped with a laser. Both methods have one goal in common: to provide patients with durable, localized and personalized control of surgical, traumatic or chronic pain with minimal side effects.
“Current approaches to postoperative pain rely on systemic analgesics, especially narcotics, which come with side effects and risks of tolerance, addition and diversion,” said Kohane, a physician in Boston Children’s Department of Critical Care Medicine. “While there is extensive literature on targeted drug delivery, the technologies developed to date are either on or off; they cannot be adjusted or repeatedly triggered to provide a desired, durable level of analgesia.
“Our goal,” he continued, “was to engineer an approach to pain control that once administered could be triggered as needed.”
Read the full post on Vector: Lasers for on-demand local pain relief?
The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of MassDevice.com or its employees.
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