BPR Pain Hour: Novel pain models and assessments

23 August 2022 at 1-2pm AEST via Zoom

The mission of our Basic Pain Research Special Interest Group (BPR SIG) is to share, improve, and promote scientific knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms of nociception and pain across all levels of investigation, from molecular and cellular analyses to preclinical or clinical studies.

This forum will provide an informal platform to promote and share our research and insights, from ECRs (including students) and senior colleagues.

Session 4: Novel pain models and assessments

Summary: This Pain Hour will welcome presentations from two speakers: Zihe Alex Zhang, a graduate student at the group of Prof Clifford Woolf, Harvard Medical School, USA, and Dr Blake Smith, a postdoc at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Alex will present on “Towards decoding the rodent body language of ongoing pain”. Effective animal models and pain assessments are needed to understand the nature of and develop rational treatments for pathological pain. As they are non-verbal, animals cannot self-report pain sensations. Thus, pain perception must be inferred from behavioural signs or physiological markers. Using current technology in machine vision and learning, Alex’s research goals are to gain an understanding of how an ongoing pain state alters the body language of a freely moving mouse; and to explore how this knowledge could be used to infer the dynamics of pain states in animals in an automated, objective, and robust manner.

Dr Blake Smith will present his development of the Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) neuropathic chronic skin pain model. He will provide an overview of EB-related skin conditions, the preclinical models, pain phenotyping, and the lead mouse model for ongoing chronic skin pain studies, with implications for therapeutic targets and drug screening.

Both speakers will use their presentations to describe their recent findings on novel technologies for the preclinical detection of pain and analgesia.

The invited speakers:

> Zihe Alex Zhang - F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, USA; Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, USA.

> Dr Blake Smith - Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.

All are welcome to attend, including postgraduate students.

We look forward to seeing you there, please register here