Fatty acid binding protein 5 inhibition attenuates pronociceptive cytokine/chemokine expression and suppresses osteoarthritis pain: A comparative human and rat study.

Objective: Osteoarthritis (OA) is often accompanied by debilitating pain that is refractory to available analgesics due in part to the complexity of signaling molecules that drive OA pain and our inability to target these in parallel. Fatty acid binding protein 5 (FABP5) is a lipid chaperone that regulates inflammatory pain; however, its contribution to OA pain has not been characterized.

Design: This combined clinical and pre-clinical study utilized synovial tissues obtained from subjects with end-stage OA and rats with monoiodoacetate-induced OA.