Peptide directoryBrain, hypothalamus & pituitary

Nocistatin

Nociceptin’s neighbour on the same precursor, which blocks its effects.

Where it comes from

Made in
Spinal cord and brain, cut from prepronociceptin just ahead of nociceptin
Sent out by
With nociceptin
Acts on
  • Spinal cord pain circuits
  • Hippocampus

What it does

  • Blocks the pain and lowered thresholds nociceptin causes 1
  • Reverses nociceptin’s effect on learning, and the human form is active in animals 2
  • A built-in antagonist from the same gene, cut from the precursor just before nociceptin 3

In medicine

  • No medicine copies it or blocks it, and no receptor for it has been found, which is the main reason no drug work has started 1
  • It has been detected in human brain and spinal fluid and the human sequence is active, but no clinical laboratory measures it 2

Beyond the body’s own use

  • Nothing is in trials. The peptide is used in the laboratory as a way of switching nociceptin’s effects off without blocking the NOP receptor 1
  • Its interest is in the arrangement: one gene, one precursor, two peptides that oppose each other, so how the precursor is cut rather than how much is made decides what the cell releases 3
  • What is unknown is what it binds. It does not bind the NOP receptor, and its own target has resisted identification for more than twenty-five years, so none of its effects can yet be attributed to a receptor 1

Sources

  1. Okuda-Ashitaka et al., Nocistatin, a peptide that blocks nociceptin action in pain transmission, Nature 1998
  2. Minami et al., Anti-nociceptive responses produced by the human putative counterpart of nocistatin, British Journal of Pharmacology 1998
  3. Okuda-Ashitaka & Ito, Nocistatin, a neuropeptide encoded by the nociceptin precursor gene, Peptides 2000

This card describes what a medicine is for and what the evidence says; it recommends nothing. Talk to your clinician about anything you read here.