News and Announcements
26th Annual Scientific Meeting Session Highlights
The audio and slide presentations from the following APS lectures are now available for viewing:
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Keynote Address: Pain Research: A View from the NIH Pain Consortium
Lawrence A. Tabak, DDS PhD, Co-Chair, NIH Pain Consortium, Bethesda, MD
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Environmental scans reveal that medical challenges have shifted from acute to chronic diseases and conditions. Many of these diseases and conditions result from the complex interplay between and among one's genes, environmental factors, infectious agents as well as behavioral and social issues. Increasingly, investigators are turning towards multi- and interdisciplinary research approaches to help solve heretofore-intractable complex diseases and conditions.
NIH has sought to meet these new challenges through a variety of activities and programs that span the NIH Institutes and Centers. Among these is the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, the Neuroscience Blueprint and the NIH Pain Consortium.
The NIH Roadmap for Medical research has identified major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single institute at NIH could tackle alone but that the agency as a whole must address, to make the biggest impact on the progress of medical research. The NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research aims to develop new tools, resources, and training opportunities to accelerate the pace of discovery in neuroscience research. The NIH Pain Consortium was established to enhance pain research and promote collaboration among researchers across the many NIH Institutes and Centers that have programs and activities addressing pain. The Pain Consortium also seeks to increase visibility for pain research, both within the NIH intramural and extramural communities, as well as outside the NIH, including various advocacy and patient groups. Research gaps that are best approached by trans-NIH participation are also being identified.
Current trans-NIH activities related to the support of pain research and training will be reviewed, including examples of exciting research presently being supported as well as future funding opportunities across the agency.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Plenary Session: Glial-Neuronal Interactions: Implications for Chronic Pain and Its Treatment
Joyce DeLeo, PhD, Departments of Anesthesiology and Pharmacology, Dartmouth Medical School, Lebanon, New Hampshire
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Pain clinicians need new drug therapies with decreased side effects in their armamentarium that effect different targets than what is currently available. To address these needs, there has been an exponential growth of research activity in the field of glial-immune interactions in the etiology of pain over the last decade. An explanation of how glial cells and immune mediators can cause the downstream mechanisms of enhanced neuronal firing or decreased thresholds to firing is beginning to emerge with very recent data. The synaptic involvement of glia in the pathogenesis of central sensitization draws upon concepts previously proposed by glial biologists for homeostasis, as well as in disease states, such as neurodegenerative disorders. Glia, which make up over 70% of the CNS cell population, are known to play a key role in both neuromodulation and recovery from injury and stressors. There is an intense debate over whether glia repair and maintain the CNS environment or whether they only play a deleterious role to enhance neuronal damage. An understanding of the dynamic interplay between neurons, astrocytes and microglia and how these cells modulate synaptic function is required to fully understand nociceptive processing. It is known that CNS glia control the composition of the extracellular milieu in terms of ions, amino acids and other neuroactive substances. Therefore, the ability to modulate their action may have major implications for effective and safe drug development. This presentation will provide an overview of glial biology, a timeline of glial developments in the pain field, major findings of glial-neuronal interactions in pain states and how these data will impact novel drug discovery.
Objectives:
- Review glial biology in the context of understanding synaptic function.
- Review recent data supporting that glial modulation may prove to be a novel area for drug discovery.