ASM 2026 INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER
She ended up inviting me down to her lab in Sydney for a week to visit, and although I was nervous about going, I had an absolute blast of a time getting to immerse myself in the completely different world of preclinical research. At the end of the week, she offered to collaborate and help answer some of the questions I had. I eventually said yes and spent the rest of my PhD splitting my time between Brisbane, where I was doing my clinical research, and Sydney, where I started doing preclinical work with Elspeth.
with neuropathic pain, most are not really effective. In some cases we need to treat 10 people so that one person has a clinically meaningful response, which isn’t great. And these medications often have quite significant side effects that make it hard for patients to continue with the treatment as they should. Many of these pharmacological interventions were developed in preclinical models, and while they were successful at the early stages, they failed at the human stage.
WHAT SPARKED YOUR INTEREST IN PERIPHERAL ENTRAPMENT NEUROPATHIES? As a physiotherapist I saw quite a lot of people with nerve problems, for example, people with peripheral neuropathies, because they were somewhat of an orphan problem. If there is no indication for surgery or injections, then surgeons do not have anything to offer these patients. And neurologists and rheumatologists don’t usually see this patient population. So, many of these patients end up in physiotherapy. Over the years, physiotherapists have worked out strategies to help these people move forward, reintegrate into the workplace, and live better lives again. I am glad I can contribute to the evidence base that supports clinicians to better understand and manage people with entrapment neuropathies.
So, the idea of coming the other way, finding something in humans and then working backwards, is a huge opportunity. I’m not saying that one way is better than the other, because we need both. But I feel that moving back and forth, from benchto-bedside and back again, has resulted in a lot of progress for the neuropathic pain field over the last few decades. We have a much better understanding of what is happening at a pathophysiological level.
HOW IMPORTANT IS IT THAT YOU TAKE A BENCHTO-BEDSIDE APPROACH WHEN TREATING AND RESEARCHING THIS GROUP OF PATIENTS? I believe the type of preclinical work that we can pair with the clinical work is an amazing opportunity. For example, if we think about the pharmacological interventions that are currently available for people
WHAT ARE YOU AND YOUR COLLABORATORS WORKING ON MOST INTENSELY RIGHT NOW? There are three streams of research that we’re currently working on. First, we are still working on trying to understand the transition from acute to chronic pain, and why some people recover while others do not. We have several longitudinal studies going to try and answer this question and are currently analysing data for our prospective spinerelated leg pain study, where we did a lot of detailed clinical phenotyping including somatosensory and psychological profiling, specialised MRI sequences, and the like. Second, we are looking at immune system involvement in neuropathic pain. In this line of work,
Australian Pain Society Newsletter | Volume 46, Issue 2, March 2026
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