Of all the unlikely places to find a potential treatment for arthritis pain, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have identified a mini-protein in scorpion venom that they hope will be able to mirror animal studies and target inflammation in humans.
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Study author Dr. Jim Olson explained, “For people with multijoint arthritis, the side effects of controlling the disease can be as bad or worse than the disease itself. Steroids like to go everywhere in the body except where they’re needed most. This is a strategy to improve arthritis relief with minimal systemic side effects.”
When researchers combined the protein with a steroid called triamcinolone acetonide, then tested it in rats, they found that the combination was able to successfully target joint inflammation in arthritic rats and help reverse it, with no detectable side effects.
Emily Girard, a staff scientist in the lab, explained, “It’s a pretty simple idea to take a mini-protein that naturally goes to cartilage and attach something to it so that you get targeted delivery of the drug, but it was challenging to accomplish.”
She continued, “We had to learn and adapt the behavior of the mini-protein, the chemical linker and the steroid payload to make a product that would go to cartilage, stay as long as we needed it to, release the drug at the right rate, and have a local but not systemic effect. There is more development to be done, but I hope that this work results in a therapeutic that will help a lot of people.”
Traditional care also doesn't have a lot of good hope for those who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. All they do is ameliorate or treat the symptoms — typically using highly toxic drugs, including prednisone, methotrexate, and drugs that interfere with tumor necrosis factor, like Enbrel. But if you suffer from arthritis, you don't have to suffer needlessly in a conventional treatment model. To learn more about natural treatment for arthritis, read this article.