Despite the worldwide prevalence and huge burden of pain, pain is an undertreated
phenomenon. Currently used analgesics have several limitations regarding their efficacy …

While hundreds of genes have been associated with pain, much of the molecular
mechanisms of pain remain unknown. As a result, current analgesics are limited to few …

A traditional single-target analgesic, though it may be highly selective and potent, may not
be sufficient to mitigate pain. An alternative strategy for alleviation of pain is to seek …

This special issue highlights studies that address current limitations in the methods for
preclinical development of analgesics and presents novel approaches and concepts …

Chronic pain represents a major health burden; this maladaptive pain state occurs as a
consequence of hypersensitivity within the peripheral and central components of the …

There is a critical need for effective new pharmacotherapies for pain. The paucity of new
drugs successfully reaching the clinic calls for a reassessment of current analgesic drug …

As part of the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, the National Center
for Advancing Translational Sciences is dedicated to the development of new …

Preclinical pain research has applied state-of-the-art methods over the past 40 years to
describe, characterize, and image molecules, cells, and circuits in rodents to understand the …

Biomedical science has greatly improved our understanding of pain in recent decades, but
few novel molecular entities that address fundamentally new pain mechanisms have …

Objective There is no single prevailing theory of pain that explains its origin, qualities, and
alleviation. Although many studies have investigated various molecular targets for pain …