Attention-grabbing tasks produce rapid opioid-mediated analgesia via the descending pain modulation network to alter spinal neuronal activity.

Corticospinal functional MRI reveals that the opioid remifentanil and the level of perceived analgesia modulate coupling strength between the prefrontal cortex, brainstem, and spinal cord.

Measuring individual differences in noxious-evoked baseline sensitivity in neonates can substantially reduce sample sizes required in neonatal analgesic trials.

Emerging approaches in larval zebrafish to identify safe opioid therapies without the side-effect of respiratory depression.

A novel opioid formulation producing analgesia similar to conventional opioids without permeation of blood-brain or intestinal barriers, thus precluding sedation, constipation and respiratory depression.

Exogenous opioid analgesia is mediated by MORs expressed in glutamatergic neurons, whereas endogenous opioid analgesia is mediated by MORs expressed in GABAergic neurons.

Through associative learning, environmental context can come to exert control over the endogenous opioid system such that it is recruited as a conditioned compensatory response to ongoing painful stimuli in both male and female mice, or in anticipation of a painful stimulus in females.

Localized drug photoactivation provides light-mediated analgesia in behaving mice.

Identification of how bioactive lipids bind and inhibit glycine transporters has the potential to be exploited in the development of a new class of analgesics for chronic pain.

The locus coeruleus is organised into functional modules with subsets of noradrenergic neurones independently projecting to the spinal cord and prefrontal cortex to exert discrete, antithetical modulatory actions on a range of pain-related behaviours.