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The World Pharma Congress held its 7th annual Conference on “PAIN: Novel Drug Targets and Screening Tools,” from May 21st to 23rd in Boston.   

As part of this conference aimed at assembling leaders in pain research from academia, industry, and government, Edward Bilsky, Ph.D., vice president of Research and Scholarship, director of the Center for Excellence in the Neurosciences, and professor of pharmacology, chaired a session on “Validating Animal Models: Where Are the Gaps?” 

In his presentation titled “Are we making progress in developing and validating preclinical animal models of pain and analgesia?,” Bilsky focused on where the field currently stands in developing and refining animal models to measure different aspects of pain and pain relief and how these models can be used to advance drug discovery.  

Tamara King, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical sciences, also gave a presentation titled “Preclinical assessment of pain: improving animal models in discovery research.” 

In her talk, King addressed the shortfalls of current preclinical models for assessing the efficacy of pain relief therapies, pointing out that the majority of models examine responses to evoked pain whereas “spontaneous” or non-evoked, ongoing and persistent pain is also very relevant to clinical pain patients. 

She also described her own work using a paradigm called “Conditioned Place Preference” (CPP) to evaluate the spontaneous, ongoing pain associated with osteoarthritis and bone cancer and discussed how this approach can be used more universally to develop therapies that treat pain more completely and effectively. 

For more details, visit the website.