"It turns out that pain may protect us in more direct ways than its classic job to detect potential harm and dispatch signals to the brain," said Isaac Chiu, senior investigator on one of the two new studies. Chiu's work, alongside a team from Harvard Medical School, was focused on the ways pain neurons in the gut communicate with goblet cells, a type of cell that lines the intestine and secretes protective mucous in the presence of inflammation. While it was known that there must be some way these pain-sensing neurons communicated threats to other gut cells, until now scientists didn't understand exactly what mechanisms were at play.