[WHITE PAPER] Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) in complex biology matrices: application to pain and inflammation studies

Pain is a sensation of an unpleasant nature in response to a noxious stimulus. Physiologically, pain has a critical function for survival and represents a major evolutionary advantage. Indeed a painful experience can act as a warning signal for the organism, thus influencing it to withdraw from a potentially harmful stimulus. One of the main functions of pain is to alert the body to potential injury. The neural processing of harmful stimuli is called nociception. Nociceptive pathways involve multiple actors in the peripheral and the nervous system, including but not limited to peripheral afferent nerves, nociceptors – peripheral receptors consisting of the free nervous endings of afferent nervous – found widely in the skin and the mucosa, and neuropeptides. Each of these actors constitutes a putative target to design therapeutics.
Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) has been identified as a key vasodilator neuropeptide involved in several pain and inflammation mechanisms. For example, it has been shown that CGRP is released during migraines and that increase in circulating CGRP levels can trigger migraines in patients. To understand the complex mechanisms involved in chronic pain conditions, it is important to be able to measure the levels of neuropeptides associated with nociceptive pathways such as CGRP. Bertin Bioreagent offers ELISA kits for CGRP quantification in complex human and rodent samples. Today, the Bertin Bioreagent CGRP kits are widely used by scientists and have been extensively cited in pain and inflammation studies.