The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is set to grant $4.5m to the University of Rochester Medical Center, over the next five years, to develop new therapies for acute and chronic pain.
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The research will be led by Robert Dworkin, a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Center for Human Experimental Therapeutics at the Medical Center.
Dworkin will partner with Dennis Turk from the University of Washington in Seattle and work on improving the design of chronic and acute pain trials.
Other studies the team may pursue involve developing and testing the usefulness of methods to improve how accurately patients report their pain.
The team will scour FDA databases housing information from hundreds of pain clinical trials – not typically available to researchers. They will also analyze previously published pain clinical trials and data from studies sponsored by various pharmaceutical companies.
Beyond Dworkin and Turk, the initiative, known as ‘analgesic clinical trial translations, innovations, opportunities, and networks (ACTTION), involves the collaboration of public and private organizations, including professional societies, patient advocacy groups, industry and government.