Chronic pain is the most widespread health condition facing Americans today, so it’s no surprise that researchers and medical experts are looking for alternative methods to help patients find relief. A new study out of the University of California San Francisco is taking that thought to the extreme as they have been studying scorpion venom to see if it could be harnessed to help stop some types of nerve pain.

For their study, researchers took a closer look at how scorpion venom affected the human body on a cellular level. They found that scorpion venom can actually be used to target what’s known as the wasabi receptor, a chemical-sensing protein in the nerve cells (also called TRPA1). If you’ve ever take too large of a bite of wasabi, you’ve probably felt a sting in your sinuses, and that’s your wasabi receptor reacting to the properties of wasabi.

Wasabi Receptors and Pain

Some types of scorpion venom also trigger the wasabi receptor, and this was an area of focus because when the receptor is activated, sodium and calcium ions can move into cells and induce pain and inflammation. The venom is also of interest because of the way the venom triggers the wasabi receptor. The venom contains a unique and unusual sequence of amino acids that allows it to penetrate the cell’s membrane and pass straight through as opposed to the traditional mode of entry called endocytosis. If researchers can understand how this venom can pass through the cell membrane, they may be able to replicate the process and develop medications that can penetrate the cell’s barriers, which has caused problems in the past.

“The discovery of this toxin provides scientists with a new tool that can be used to probe the molecular mechanisms of pain, in particular, to selectively probe the processes that lead to pain hypersensitivity,” said UCSF doctoral student and lead author John Lin King “And for those interested in drug discovery, our findings underscore the promise of TRPA1 as a target for new classes of non-opioid analgesics to treat chronic pain.”

Developing new drugs that can be correctly absorbed by the body to target a wide variety of pain types has always been difficult, but studying scorpion venom could give us a better understanding of cellular membranes. So while you won’t be injecting scorpion venom to help with your chronic pain anytime soon, it wouldn’t be surprising if the substance led to a breakthrough in the field of chronic pain management in the not so distant future.