IDENTIFYING NEW TREATMENTS FOR PAIN AND HEADACHE

​Novel treatments for pain are desperately needed.
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Despite our improved understanding of the physiological underpinnings of pain, few new drugs alleviate pain effectively, safely, and reliably. A large focus on our work is to identify pharmacological targets for pain and develop drugs that are specific to these targets. Through rigorous testing in laboratory rats, we evaluate the extent to which new drugs for pain produce pain relief in the absence of dangerous or unpleasant side effects.

ASSESSING PAIN IN A CLINICALLY-RELEVANT MANNER

Mimicking human pain in laboratory animals increases our chances of success.

​​Developing new drugs to treat pain requires success in animal studies and human clinical trials. It is common for new analgesic drugs to fail in clinical trials after success in animal studies. One way to limit these failures is to ensure that the way pain is assessed in laboratory animals is similar to the way pain is assessed in humans. To this end, we develop and use measures of allodynia, hyperalgesia, weight bearing, wheel running, inflammation, and acute pain to thoroughly understand the analgesic potential of new drugs.

EVALUATING PAIN-INDUCED CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR

Pain is a physiological phenomenon that affects many processes.

​​As defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain, pain is "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage". Since pain affects many facets of daily living, we use behavioral measures of anxiety, memory, and reward/aversion in laboratory animals to better understand the impact of pain and related drugs on these factors.