
Consider this scenario: A patient is home recovering from knee surgery to repair an ACL tear. Her pain medications are wearing off, and the surgical cuts are starting to throb. Reaching over to the table she picks up what’s essentially a souped-up laser pointer, points it at the surgical wound and turns it on. Within seconds, the pain starts to fade.
This picture isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. In a pair of simultaneous papers, Boston Children’s Hospital’s Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, and his laboratory recently reported their efforts to create not one, but two methods for packaging long-lasting local anesthetics in microspheres that could be injected in advance by a surgeon or anesthesiologist and that would release the drugs when zapped with a laser. Both methods have one goal in common: to provide patients with durable, localized and personalized control of surgical, traumatic or chronic pain with minimal side effects. …