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Robert Lenox, MD, Professor of Pharmacology and Clinical Neurosciences, and Frank Porreca, PhD, Professor of Pharmacology, both affiliated with the University of New England’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and members of the Center for Excellence in the Neurosciences, recently returned from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology 50th Annual Meeting in December 2011. As part of the scientific program for the meeting, they chaired a major symposium entitled: “The Development of Novel Pain Therapeutics: New Strategies to Overcome Drug Discovery Barriers”. Dr. Porreca presented “Identifying Mechanisms Underlying Affective Components of Pain and Pain Relief in rodents to Promote Discovery of New Therapies” and Dr. Lenox served as Discussant for the symposium. The other speakers in the Panel included Dr. David Borsook, Harvard University; Dr. Irene Tracey, Oxford University; and Dr. Chas Bountra, Oxford University.

A brief  abstract  of the Panel can be found below:

“New medications have not emerged for the treatment of pain for three reasons: 1) We are unable to preclinically validate mechanistic hypotheses and targets resulting in a lack of translation to humans.  2) We lack understanding of mechanisms that drive pain clinically resulting in an inability to match new mechanisms to appropriate patient groups. 3) The pharmaceutical industry continues to compete on targets without validation, resulting in a lack of collective learning and waste of time and global resources. This ACNP panel consisting of leaders in the field will address scientific strategies including preclinical study of pain perception rather than nocioception; and neuroimaging to identify circuits in animals and humans that modulate the human pain experience to redefine appropriate outcome measures for more effective clinical development. We will also describe the use of structural genomics to produce novel probes for target validation within a public private consortium. Surmounting these drug discovery challenges in pain will provide new insight for the development of novel treatments for other neuropsychiatric disorders.”