The Challenge of Chronic Pain

The Challenge of Chronic Pain is organized by Wellcome Genome Campus and will be held from Mar 04 - 06, 2019 at Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, England, United Kingdom.

Course Description:
Chronic pain is a major healthcare challenge across the globe. Approximately 20% of the world’s population suffers from ongoing pain that severely impacts their quality of life. Many of these individuals are poorly served with currently available treatment modalities. This can lead to opioid abuse and overdose following their use of prescription opioids intended for pain relief. An opioid epidemic that has stemmed largely from the desire to treat chronic pain reveals the root problem: the critical need to discover, test and implement new, improved and safe treatments for chronic pain.

This is the ideal time to attend the 2019 Challenge of Chronic Pain Conference, which will showcase the most recent discoveries and potential avenues for therapies in chronic pain research and treatment. World leaders in pain research including those working in basic science, translational research and clinical therapies will present the latest and most promising findings, as well as the challenges left to overcome.

Important, timely topics will include the clinical landscape of pain syndromes, mechanistic underpinnings of structural and functional plasticity in neural pathways, evidence that pain mechanisms can differ across females and males. We will also focus on the early childhood influences and trauma on development of chronic pain in later life, the need for increased rigor and transparency to identify truly translatable pain therapies, complex influences of the brain on pain perception and the potential of individual genetic analyses towards personalized pain medicine.

Topics will include:
• Molecules and cells of nociception
• Neural circuits in pain and the effects of opioids
• Development and transition to chronic pain
• Pain in the brain
• Genetics of pain
• Translation and new therapeutics in pain

Additional details will be posted as soon as they are available.