Leveraging crowdsourcing to facilitate the discovery of new medicines

Gloomy predictions about the future of pharma have forced the industry to investigate alternative models of drug discovery. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have the potential to revitalize the discovery and development of first-in-class therapeutics. The new PPP Arch2POCM hopes to foster biomedical innovation through precompetitive validation of pioneer therapeutic targets for human diseases. In this meeting report, we capture insights garnered from the April 2011 Arch2POCM conference.     

Judging pain and disability: effects of pain severity and physician specialty

While considerable evidence indicates that the assessment of pain is an exercise in social cognition, provider contributions to pain assessment have received little attention. This study compared internist versus neurosurgeon ratings of pain and pain-related disability for hypothetical patients reporting either low or high levels of low back pain. Using practice characteristics as covariates, a multivariate analysis of covariance showed that both physician groups rated pain severity, but not measures of disability, as significantly lower for the low pain severity condition. Relative to internists, neurosurgeons rated both pain severity and pain-related disability as significantly lower, regardless of patient-reported pain severity. There were no interactions between physician specialty and patient-reported pain severity. Practice characteristics accounted for relatively little variance in ratings. Results are discussed in terms of differences in comparison levels for the physician groups, as well as implications for clinical practice and disability determination systems.     

Volunteer studies in pain research--opportunities and challenges to replace animal experiments: the report and recommendations of a Focus on Alternatives workshop

Despite considerable research, effective and safe treatments for human pain disorders remain elusive. Understanding the biology of different human pain conditions and researching effective treatments continue to be dominated by animal models, some of which are of limited value. British and European legislation demands that non-animal approaches should be considered before embarking on research using experimental animals. Recent scientific and technical developments, particularly in human neuroimaging, offer the potential to replace some animal procedures in the study of human pain. A group of pain research experts from academia and industry met with the aim of exploring creatively the tools, strategies and challenges of replacing some animal experiments in pain research with ethically conducted studies of human patients and healthy volunteers, in combination with in vitro methods. This report considers how a range of neuroimaging techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography and positron emission tomography, singly and combined, can address human pain conditions. In addition, microdialysis in human subjects; genome-wide association research, twin studies and other epidemiological approaches; and in vitro cell and tissue research, are examined for their replacement potential in combination with neuroimaging. Recommendations highlight further opportunities to advance the replacement of animal studies with robust methods of relevance to understanding and treating human pain.