Advanced Targeting Systems

"Pain is good," asserts Douglas Lappi, PhD, president and founder of Advanced Targeting Systems . "People who lack the ability to sense pain have very shortened life spans." The trick, says Lappi, is to short-circuit the signals that cause chronic, intractable pain and leave intact the body's ability to detect incoming pain stimuli like heat, chemicals, or injury. In the US, 70 million people suffer from chronic pain. Many disorders cause people to become hypersensitive to stimuli that otherwise would not cause pain. Many people also suffer from pain that persists in the absence of an ongoing injury, such as sufferers of phantom limb pain, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and diabetic neuropathy. The company believes it has found a solution to these types of pain syndromes in the permanent elimination of neurons in the spinal cord which express receptors for substance P.

Substance P is a neurotransmitter that is implicated in several disorders, including cancer, asthma, emesis, depression, and pain. Capsaicin, a topical anesthetic isolated from chili peppers is the only approved...