New pharmacological strategies for pain relief

Persistent or chronic pain is the primary reason people seek medical advice. Despite major advances in the neurobiology of pain, many patients with chronic pain still remain insufficiently relieved. The urgent medical need for novel and safe analgesics with high efficacy has led to intense research for new targets and we want to give a comprehensive overview on the current strategies in molecular pain research. The recently-discovered or re-evaluated targets that yielded compounds in clinical development will be summarized. In addition, we want to present emerging molecular strategies for pain relief, along with a mechanism-based classification of pain as the underlying concept for future diagnosis and therapy of chronic pain.