Dive into Innovative Pain Science at 3 Leading Universities
By Kirsten Ellis
Pain research is growing in leaps and bounds—with educational institutions playing a key role.
Hear from pain scientists at three leading universities about their efforts, and how pain research and treatment have evolved at their institutions.
Center for Pain Medicine | University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Allan Basbaum, PhD, chair of the Department of Anatomy at UCSF, has watched pain research transform for decades.
“The technology has gone through the roof—it is unbelievable,” he says. “But the questions haven’t changed. It is just how you go about trying to answer them.”
Basbaum has studied how pain inputs are processed in the spinal cord, and how opioids work in the brain and spinal cord to relieve pain. “The bane of pain is plainly in the brain—that’s what I tell my medical students,” he says.
His recent projects include using calcium imaging to characterize the emotional components of the pain experience. Basbaum’s lab is also exploring how tissue and nerve injuries alter the nervous system to produce chronic pain.
A multidisciplinary approach informs his efforts—he notes that while methods such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can take longer, they are useful components in pain treatment. But, he shares: “My dream, of course, is to come up with a better drug.”
Current efforts at UCSF, in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seek to use artificial intelligence to identify new molecules that more effectively target pain receptors.
Using AI technology to screen billions of new compounds, a previously impossible scale, the initiative aims to pinpoint the most promising ones to then be synthesized and tested. Its ultimate objective is to develop pain-relieving compounds whose analgesic properties are as effective as morphine and similar therapeutics, but with fewer adverse side effects, Basbaum says.
“We hope to bring them to patients one day—we are excited about that,” he says.
Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center | University of Michigan
While working as a rheumatologist at Georgetown University, Dan Clauw, MD, often saw patients with fibromyalgia—called “fibrositis” at the time, and widely misunderstood and mischaracterized.
“These people really had something wrong with them, they weren’t making this up, but no one really knew what was going on,” he says.
That compelled him to study pain further. While he was not formally trained as a scientist, he began asking questions and assembling a team.
“I joke that I started doing team science before it was a thing,” says Clauw, now the director of the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center at the University of Michigan. Founded in 1998, the center focuses on interdisciplinary research. Unlike many other leading research and educational institutions, it does not offer clinical care.
One impactful research effort from Clauw and his team centered around the “Gulf War illnesses”—unexplained, chronic symptoms such as pain, fatigue, and memory loss experienced by returning veterans.
“Our hypothesis was that it was not a unique problem; they had what in the general population would be called fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome,” Clauw says. His team used brain imaging and other studies to corroborate the overlap of those pain and symptoms, validating the veterans’ experiences and pointing to potential treatment options.
Clauw now spends much of his time mentoring. His trainees’ research projects range from brain stimulation and CBT to cannabinoids and psychedelics.
His team is working to hone in on pain conditions stemming from interactions or changes in the brain and central nervous system, rather than the peripheral nervous system—followed by identifying the best treatments for those conditions.
“Surgery and injections and opioids are not going to work for that kind of pain,” he explains. “That’s coming from the brain.”
Division of Pain Medicine | Stanford University School of Medicine
The research enterprise at Stanford Medicine deeply informs the system’s clinical offerings, says Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of Stanford’s Division of Pain Medicine.
“We are still practicing somewhat in the dark ages when it comes to pain,” he says. “There’s a need for better ways of assessing and treating pain, both at the individual level and in society as a whole.”
The division’s multidisciplinary structure brings together specialists to holistically evaluate and treat patients—with research as a core tenet. Incoming patients are assessed through a learning health system Mackey created called CHOIR, which melds population data, research discoveries, and coordinated care.
“We use that data to augment clinical decision-making and define the best diagnosis, the best assessment, and help choose the best treatments,” he explains.
The team plans to layer in multimodal biomarker data—such as neuroimaging, quantitative sensory testing, and multi-omics readouts—to advance precision pain care.
In 2021, Mackey and his team published a CHOIR-propelled paper reminding researchers to take a whole-person approach.
“What we found was 80% of patients with migraine have multiple overlapping pain conditions,” he says. “They’ve got migraine plus neck pain, or migraine and back pain, or migraine plus IBS. Pain conditions don’t exist in isolation. We need to treat the whole person.”
The lack of equitable access in pain care is another problem that propels Mackey’s efforts.
“Most of the country doesn’t have access to the type of health care that we can deliver at Stanford or in other major academic centers,” he shares. “So how do we reach out and provide high-quality care to those people? Those are the things that drive my research.”
Whether through expansive AI-bolstered compound-screening efforts, targeted treatments for pain stemming from the central nervous system, or data-driven advancements in precision pain treatment, these institutions are among the leaders redefining pain science.