Institute for Pain Research & Care Seed Grants
“Our project uses pain signature levels to interrogate the Connectivity Map database to identify drugs and natural compounds that can be repurposed for treating chronic postsurgical pain for the OA patient group that are susceptible to developing chronic pain. The derived pain signatures will be used to inform new drug discovery/repurposing to treat chronic postsurgical pain of OA patients.” - Dr. Fei Geng
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Who is Susceptible to Developing CPSP? A HighThroughput Clinical Proteomics-Based Approach for the Prediction of Susceptibility Primary Investigator: Fei Geng, PhD Start Date: 2021
Brief Overview and Progress to Date Most, if not all, cases of CPSP include neuropathic pain (Gerdle and Ghafouri, 2020). The remainder having nociceptive (somatic or visceral) pain. The long-term goals of this research are to 1) define pain signatures to predict who is at risk for and who is resilient to developing chronic postsurgical pain from OA patients; 2) develop precision medicine to prevent or treat lasting pain from OA patients who are susceptible to chronic pain, potentially reducing reliance on opioids. The short-term goals are to 1) discover the pain signatures using high-throughput proteomic analysis of CPSP negative and positive plasma samples from OA patients after TKA; 2) validate the pain signatures using a separate validation cohort of OA patients. 3) clinical application of pain signatures in predicting chronic postsurgical pain for OA patients. Through this process we will identify and validate molecular signatures predictive of conversion from acute to chronic pain (pain signatures), which would provide new avenues to predict, prevent or attenuate chronic pain conversion, with a wide range of biochemical species that could provide a novel multi-molecular signature to chronic pain conversion.
