Pain Mechanisms and the Development of Analgesics

Organizer(s): Tony L. Yaksh, Mitchell B. Max, James C. Eisenach, Patrick W. Mantyh and Frank Porreca

Supported by The Director's Fund

Summary of Meeting:

Pain and its control are appreciated to be a major medical problem. Over the past 20 years there have been major advances in our understanding of the mechanisms by which information leading to a pain state is processed. In spite of these substantial insights into the complex pharmacology, the translation of mechanistic data into clinically relevant drugs has been tedious. Several problems are recognized. First, an important problem relates to the interpretation of the preclinical behavioral models with respect to predicting human efficacy and whether specific models adequately predict outcomes in different pain states. Second, it is believed that the human experimental model would provide important insights into efficacy early in the drug development process, but validation of this model has been difficult. The meeting will first review the current thinking regarding the mechanisms whereby information generated by acute stimulation, tissue injury and nerve injury are encoded in a manner so as to present a pain state. Secondly, the preclinical surrogate models which present the behavioral expression of the noxious event will be reviewed and cross model consistency and reliability will be reviewed. Thirdly, we will review the experimental human models that provide a correlate in human volunteers of the preclinically defined pain mechanisms and consider their ability to predict drug activity in pathological states. Finally, presenters will review the implementation of human trials which define the analgesic efficacy of drug therapies. An important aspect of these 4 components is the frequent implementation of case-based parallels that reflect successes in prediction (e.g. COX2 inhibitors, GABApentin, ziconotide) and failures (NK1 antagonist).

Scholarship Deadline: February 9 2006

Discounted Abstract Deadline: February 9 2006

Abstract Deadline: April 11 2006

Discounted Registration Deadline: April 11 2006

We gratefully acknowledge additional support for this conference from:

We gratefully acknowledge additional in-kind support for this conference from those foregoing speaker expense reimbursements:

Merck & Co., Inc.

Pfizer Inc.

Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Wyeth Consumer Healthcare

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals

We gratefully acknowledge the generous grant for this conference provided by:

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
Grant No. 1R13 DA021484-01

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