For the past four years, Dr Meritxell Canals and Professor Chris Porter have led a 22-strong team at Melbourne's Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, working on the cutting edge of pain relief.
Dr Canals says animal tests found that targeting medication to pain receptors in the centre of cells, rather than the surface, offers more effective and longer lasting pain relief.
“We were targeting receptors at the surface of the cell and this was proven not to be as effective in the case of pain, what we've done now is target the right location which is inside the cell,” she said.
She says the study centred on inflammatory and non-inflammatory pain common to many diseases and conditions.
“These could be represented, for example, by pain patients suffer when they have arthritis or cancer-related pain or diabetes as well,” Dr Canals said.
Professor Chris Porter, director of the Institute, is enthusiastic about the breakthrough.
“It's the first study that's shown if we direct drugs to that environment we get a very different outcome than the traditional way of targeting these things from the top of the cell,” he said.
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Pain expert Dr Chris Vaughan, from Royal North Shore Hospital's Pain Management and Research Institute, says he's cautiously optimistic about the results, but will reserve overall judgement until further studies examine pain, such as that caused by physical trauma.
“The study didn't look at those pain states in their pre-clinical studies or in people so both need to be done,” he said.
And the Melbourne team hopes that process is next.
“We need to do toxicity studies and we obviously need to move on to carefully controlled clinical trials as well,” Dr Canals said.
For many, it can't come soon enough.
Grace Day, 85, lives with a broken pelvis sustained through her bone cancer. She says some days the pain is difficult to manage, and she longs for an effective and long lasting remedy.
“It would be heaven sent because you have to go through this and I know that I've got to go through a lot more pain in the future,” she said.
