We experience chilli peppers as hot because they activate an enzyme called c-Kit. It now seems that getting rid of c-Kit increases pain tolerance in mice, while stimulating it lowers the level at which heat becomes painful. This could lead to the development of a new class of painkillers that work by blocking the enzyme.
The skin contains more than a million “nociceptors”, or bare nerve endings, around half of which fire in response to pain. Gary Lewin and colleagues at the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, found that mice which cannot make c-Kit took 40 per cent longer to jerk their…
