Target for Pain May Also Reduce Brain Injury from Trauma

Another hyperacute option to have your researcher study up on. I may have to have a complete medical bag with all the hyperacute options I've talked about and become my own guinea pig. And hope with a second stroke I am lucid enough to direct my own hyperacute options.
http://www.dddmag.com/Target-for-Pain-May-Also-Reduce-Brain-Injury-from-Trauma-081511.aspx

A peptide that appears to minimize acute and chronic pain was identified as a potential tool to prevent for cell death following traumatic brain injury.

Indiana University School of Medicine researchers show that this peptide short circuits a pathway for chronic pain without interfering with other important nerve functions. Rajesh Khanna, PhD, an assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the IU School of Medicine, and colleagues thought the peptide, CDB3, might be related to cell death in the brain because of another protein it interacts with.

“At least 50 years of research has shown that the NMDA receptor, a protein with well-established links to cell death, gets turned on with injury or trauma leading to massive toxic calcium influx into the cells causing cell death,” Khanna says. “Our strategy was to regulate this protein – to control it but not block it completely since some calcium is needed for fundamental cellular functions.”

The CDB3 peptide spares neurons from death following traumatic brain injury following stroke and accidents. Testing is ongoing as to the usefulness of this peptide in a blast injury model mimics injuries from explosions, motorcycle accidents and other trauma.

Khanna says a single systemic injection of CDB3 allows sufficient peptide to cross the blood-brain barrier and “produces a marked reduction in cell death in the hippocampus, an area important for memory and learning.”

“We’ve extended the function of this peptide beyond pain and the fact that CBD3 protects neurons when given two hours after stroke is very promising,” Khanna adds. The next step in the research is to test the effectiveness of injections of the peptide at longer intervals following injury and with different types of brain injury. The expectation is that targeting the NMDA receptor with this peptide could lead to development of neurotherapeutics against traumatic brain injury as well as other neuronal insults.

The research was published online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.