Preface by the Editor

Abstract

With over 600 reviews, Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channels arguably represent today’s most extensively reviewed pharmacological targets. The literature on TRP channels is vast and still growing: it has exploded from a mere 21 papers in 1995 to over 2,000 in the past two years. In the past fifteen years, the field had shown spectacular progress. From the cloning of the vanilloid (capsaicin) recep a novel class of analgesic agents.tor TRPV1 in 1997 it has taken only a decade for the first small molecule TRPV1 antagonists to enter clinical trials as So why to add another review collection to this already overwhelming body of literature? First, new therapeutic tar-gets are emerging (e.g. TRPA1 and TRPV3) that look even more promising than TRPV1. Second, even the most studied TRP channel, TRPV1, continues to surprise. One might ar-gue that we are still at the beginning of the long and arduous road to obtain clinically useful analgesic drugs targeting TRP channels. It remains to be discovered if TRP channels are really Targets for Pain Relief, but it has already been clear that Bernd Nilius was right in calling TRP channels “Truly Remarkable Proteins.”