Pain Experts Join Forces

Designs on Aging-Ready

By Strategic Communications

Four major centers within the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, which each approach pain research from a different angle, have now joined forces under the new Pittsburgh Pain Consortium. They’re combining their shared expertise to identify new ways to treat and manage pain.  

“We all do pain research at Pitt, but we didn’t really interact with each other as much as we should or could,” says Rebecca Seal, professor of neurobiology, School of Medicine, and researcher with the Pittsburgh Center for Pain Research. “We’re now unifying under the Pittsburgh Pain Consortium all the pain research that’s done at Pitt, and we’re even trying to perhaps widen our scope.”

The consortium’s first undertaking was the inaugural Pain Day, which featured faculty presentations and a poster session about their latest research, Pain Challenge Awards from the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Pitt, and a keynote speech from David Julius, of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and a 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The day’s speakers weren’t limited to Pitt: Experts from neighboring Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University also shared their recent advances. 

Now is an exciting time to study pain management, says Benedict Alter, assistant professor and director of translational pain research, Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, School of Medicine. Recent progress in the field, for example, has led to the first new class of drugs to treat pain to be approved by the FDA in more than 20 years. That means new opportunities for study and collaboration to understand how these drugs and others can best help patients.

“To accelerate that process, we need interactions among everyone who’s doing pain-focused research at every different level,” Alter says.   

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