Center for chronic pain and drug abuse

项目总结/文摘

Project Summary/Abstract The Pain Center is designed to study and enhance understanding of the mechanisms of chronic pain and the interaction between opioid analgesia and opioid dependence. Our main goal is to build upon the recent discovery that chronic pain is shaped by the same brain circuitry that controls opioid addiction. We focus on pain, addiction, and opioid research in humans and in animals’ models. All projects are united by the common goal to unravel how the mesocorticolimbic circuitry in chronic pain is reorganized by repeated exposure to opioids, and how this plasticity shapes the analgesic and addictive properties of opioids. The Pain Center is composed of an interdisciplinary team of PIs. All of us have trained many graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and takes very seriously our role in facilitating the career development of the Pain Center students. The NIDA supported summer students will be able to interact with a multidisciplinary team composed by several post-doctoral fellows, graduate, undergraduate students and research assistants. There are multiple opportunities for them to engage in both human and animal mechanistic studies. As these summer students have no prior research experience, we will need to explore with them how and in what capacity they can be engaged in the ongoing research of the Pain Center.