Sam Robinson Deconstructs Stings, Poisons, and Venoms

What's a stinging tree? Hikers in Australia are familiar with this needle-covered plant that can cause hours of pain. Researcher Sam Robinson has been studying how this tree's sting causes pain, and found a connection to chemotherapy-associated pain that may help researchers find a solution. His work includes the study of numerous toxic plants and animals and the chemistry behind our painful biological reaction. He discusses

Some fascinating examples of organisms and their toxins,
The two main categories of toxins and how they work on a broad scale, and
The benefits of deconstructing how these toxins work on detailed level for potential chronic pain management and pharmacology.

Dr. Sam Robinson is a research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Biological Science at the University of Queensland in Australia. It took a walk on the beach and a jellyfish sighting to get his curiosity in gear for researching how toxins cause pain. He's focused on exploring painful toxins in a systematic way, down to the proteins and genetics involved.

He adds that venom, for example, is not the same across different animals. Rather, there's a "whole cocktail of different toxins" with different uses, from capturing prey to self-defense, and they can affect different parts of the organism they bite.

While their similar functions come down to convergent evolution, there are a host of different ingredients. He gives several specific examples and explains why he's especially focused on toxins that affect our cellular voltage-gated sodium channels. That's where the stinging tree comes in. He's found that the tree injects a toxin that keeps those channels open, causing hours of pain.

Furthermore, after the pain is gone, it can be revived by exposure to cold in a phenomena called cold allodynia, a condition chemotherapy patients also experience. This is the kind of connection that makes his research potentially applicable to numerous pain-related diseases and treatment.

Listen in for more examples of pain deconstructed.