PAIN is a fascinating thing. Whilst it’s probably not our first thought when we shut our finger in the door or burn our hand on the stove, the processes involved in our reaction to painful stimuli are astonishingly complex.

This pain response protects us from further injury and allows us to attend to potential threats. It’s there to help us, but it may not always feel like it, particularly when pain persists for days, months or even years.

From ibuprofen to topical anaesthetic, we have many successful methods of dealing with short-term pain, but when it comes to chronic pain, things get a bit more challenging.

Because the biological processes involved in pain are so intricate, it’s not easy to identify the best target for drugs. Many of the medicines we currently use were generated through a sort of trial and error. Scientists with a rough idea of the processes they wanted to manipulate experimented with different compounds until they had a substance that elicited a positive therapeutic effect.

We’ve had access to painkillers like ibuprofen since the 1960s, and others like morphine and codeine for much longer than that. But until recent years we haven’t been able to explore their impact on the atomic level, so we’re still not 100 per cent sure how they work.

That’s why scientists in Oxfordshire and around the world are scrutinising the processes behind pain in never-before-seen detail. Because if we can work out exactly what’s going on there, we may be able to create drugs that are more targeted, create fewer side-effects and address chronic pain more effectively.

So what do we know about pain? Well, pain is the result of electrical signals being sent from the nerves to the brain. When we come into contact with something that triggers pain, the nerves begin to fire off charged particles called ions.

These ions enter into the nerve cells through a microscopic hole called the ‘ion channel’. Once inside the cells, the ions generate a charged current which allows the nerves to fire off that electrical message to the brain letting us know we’re in pain. All of this happens in a mere fraction of a second.

The challenge is to create a drug that shuts off some element of the process mid-flow. And there’s one component that looks particularly promising: that tiny, microscopic hole called the ion channel.

This hole opens and closes to let ions into the nerve cells. If the ions can’t get into the cells, they can’t generate the current that the nerves need to send electrical signals to the brain: goodbye pain.

And so our scientists are scrutinising the atomic structure of the ion channels involved in pain with a view to creating next-generation painkillers. By visualising the structure of the ion channel on this level, we may be able to design compounds that fit, like a key inside a lock, into the structure, forcing the channel to remain shut.

We now have the advanced technology necessary to carry out research on the atomic scale, and painkillers are one of the many existing medicines that could be improved by having a more in-depth understanding of human biology.

We can now take a more systematic approach to designing drugs: visualising the target in incredible detail and then piecing together the perfect compound to interact with it. This is a big step forwards in the treatment of all kinds of diseases.

More research is needed before we start to see ion channel-targeted painkillers on the shelves. But this early stage research is vital to helping us to build up the thorough understanding necessary to hit pain where it hurts.

* Mary Cruse is the science communicator at the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.