Professor Andrew Shorthouse, Consultant Colorectal Surgeon, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Honorary Professor, Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr Wen Jiang, Research Associate in the Dept. of Biomedical Science, Univ. of Sheffield
Sensory nerves carry information from outlying parts of the body to the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system). Different sensory nerves convey information about pain, temperature, touch, taste etc. to the brain.
Currently we do not know how sensory nerves work in humans, due to the difficulty (for ethical reasons) of extracting them from the human body and studying them. What we do know comes from the study of animals, and its applicability to humans is obviously limited. Thus our ability to control the pain of sufferers from chronic bowel disease is severely limited.
As far as we know, this research on sensory nerves in the human body will be a world first. It builds on earlier preliminary work by this team. The plan is to study segments of human colon removed during cancer surgery from patients who have given consent for this tissue to be used for research purposes. The segments will be removed anyway as they are on the margins of the tumour and standard practice in cancer surgery is to remove marginal cells.
The project will use a variety of sophisticated techniques to study the properties of these sensory nerves, especially regarding pain. In addition to making valuable discoveries about how these sensory nerves function, the aim is to develop a robust experimental model for future use.
If such a model is successfully established, it can then be used to screen particular drugs to see if they are effective for pain relief, and to improve treatment in other ways. It is envisaged this will be of particular benefit to patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Thus the project combines basic research with the potential to lead to novel drug discovery for more effective medical treatment for IBD and IBS patients.
This page was last updated on 20-07-2011