What We Know About the Mechanisms of Action of Inhaled Anesthetics
_{Fresh Approaches to Perianesthetic Care of Small and Large Animal Patients}

Inhalation anesthesia was first publicly demonstrated 176 years ago, but efforts to understand how this class of anesthetics works at a cellular level remain ongoing. This lecture will review how inhaled anesthetics differ from other pharmaceuticals in their drug-target interactions and why this has created challenges in understanding their molecular mechanisms of action. Contemporary theories of subcellular interactions will be reviewed, with an emphasis on recent discoveries of non-specific protein interactions with inhalants at pre- and post-synaptic locations. Finally, potential application of non-specific protein theories to the development of new and novel inhaled agents will be presented.