TRP - Tackling the Roots of Pain

About one in five adult Europeans suffer from chronic pain. The societal costs associated with pain are immense, exceeding those associated with heart disease, cancer or diabetes combined. Despite the fact that access to adequate pain management is considered a Fundamental Human Right, about half of the chronic pain sufferers report inadequate pain control with available treatments. Moreover, the dramatic increase in the use of opioids to treat chronic pain has caused an “opioid epidemic”, with an alarming rise in the number of drug-associated fatalities. Therefore, there is a high unmet medical need for new, safe and effective pain treatments. A growing body of evidence, including breakthrough contributions from the applicants, points at TRP ion channels as transducers of acute pain signaling, and indicates that their malfunctioning may drive pathological pain states. Yet, we lack a full understanding of how TRP channels contribute to pathological pain signaling, and how this can be pharmacologically corrected, hindering the development of TRP channel-based therapies for pain patients. In a consortium of clinical and preclinical research experts, we propose a translational approach, involving both animal models and human subjects, to study the involvement of TRP channel in pathological pain conditions, with particular focus on pain associated with chemotherapy, autosomal polycystic kidney disease and bladder dysfunction. We anticipate that the results obtained in this project will open new avenues to help the many patients that lack effective pain treatment.

Keywords:chronic pain, early clinical development, target engagement models, TRP channels, animal models of disease

Disciplines:Neurological and neuromuscular diseases, Neurophysiology