This news seems to talk about possible treatments for chronic pain. King’s College London has supposedly been chosen as the academic lead for a new public-private consortium, Europain to comprehend and enhance treatment of chronic pain. This project is said to continue for around 5 years.
Around 1 in 5 adults experience chronic pain. This appears to include a chief cause of long-term sick leave and forced early retirement, thereby placing a huge financial burden on both people as well as healthcare systems. In spite of the widespread research programmes by biopharmaceutical companies and academia, there seemingly remains a requirement for treatments that are said to be more effectual and with lesser side-effects.
Professor Steve McMahon, from the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King’s, who along with Dr Dave Bennett will be running the project at the College, commented, “There are some big questions facing the pain field at the moment and this consortium, drawing on the skills and expertise of both academia and industry, is in a unique position to address them.”
Europain has presumably created a global team of leading researchers and clinicians from both academia and industry to experience multidisciplinary translational research. This team strives to augment the comprehension of chronic pain mechanisms, aids to craft novel analgesics and come up with better biomarkers for pain. Their eventual objective is to apparently enhance the lives of people enduring chronic pain.
During the five-year project, Europain is all set to embark on huge number of preclinical and clinical studies. Outcomes would be made public during and after the project, thereby making sure that the knowledge developed could be extensively used to the growth of improved therapies for patients enduring chronic pain.
Professor McMahon’s team could add to both the pre-clinical and clinical features of the project. One function may be to examine the expression of potential pain mediators in both animal models of pain and samples from patients undergoing chronic pain. The function of novel pain mediators could then be examined by means of various methods varying from cell culture to quantitative sensory testing in humans.