FORUM Networking event: Understanding chronic pain

BNA Event - 10th Dec 2021

Time: 17:00 - 18:30  (BST)
Online Event

The Academy of Medical Sciences’ FORUM, in partnership with the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and Versus Arthritis, will host a dedicated digital networking event, themed around ‘experimental medicine and clinical insights for understanding chronic pain'.

Chronic pain - pain that carries on for three months or longer despite medication or treatment - is estimated to affect up to 43% of the UK population and this is likely to rise with our ageing population and increasing prevalence of comorbidities, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the prevalence of chronic pain, treatment options are few and often have limited efficacy. There is a need for new, more effective therapies for chronic pain, yet the pipeline for new therapies has stalled. We need new cross-sectoral efforts to learn from historical challenges and consider where new approaches, such as ‘reverse translation’, could be most impactful for us to better understand pain and reinvigorate the therapeutic pipeline.

This networking event will immediately follow a virtual FORUM workshop exploring the current landscape of translational chronic pain research and consider how clinical research, through experimental medicine, clinical insights and patient experience, can help provide new evidence sources to inform preclinical drug discovery. The workshop Chair, Professor Irene Tracey FMedSci, will give a short talk at the beginning of the networking event, summarising the workshop discussion.

Using a dedicated digital networking platform, Remo, this event will invite attendees to share their reflections on 'experimental medicine and clinical insights for understanding chronic pain’. The aim of the networking event will be to bring together chronic pain-relevant researchers, policy makers and healthcare professionals from across the FORUM network to make new connections and rekindle old ones, while reflecting on and continuing the fruitful discussion begun in the FORUM workshop.

This FORUM networking event will take place at 17.00 to 18.30 on Friday 10 December 2021 via Remo, following on from a smaller, invitation-only FORUM workshop on the same topic.