Center for the Genomics of Pain

描述(由申请人提供)：根据医学研究所(IOM)最近发布的关于缓解美国疼痛的报告(2011)，慢性疼痛是一种公共卫生流行病，影响着1.16亿美国人，每年造成超过6000亿美元的医疗费用和工作效率损失。更多的美国人遭受痛苦，比那些患有心脏病、糖尿病和癌症的人加起来还要多。尽管最近在治疗方面取得了进展，但大多数人并没有获得足够的疼痛缓解。一个重要的焦点是了解慢性疼痛的基本生物学，以便开发新的基于机械的治疗方法。不幸的是，标准的研究和开发管道从试验台开始，拥有数百条已知的信号通路，在疼痛研究中并没有产生许多新的靶点。在最近的一篇评论中，美国国立卫生研究院院长弗朗西斯·柯林斯认为，这些失败可能是由于从板凳到板凳的前馈翻译连续体，依赖于生物学上众所周知的途径。在药物开发方面，其结果是临床时间延长，失败率高，成本过高。在这个“组学”研究的时代，结合Geneti和基因组数据的研究可能会产生数以千计的新的、潜在的可用药靶点。这个疼痛基因组学中心的目的是将疼痛和共病情况的严格表型与尖端基因组学相结合，以更充分地了解个体差异如何减轻或放大疼痛。该中心的概念框架改编自William Maixner博士的模型，结合了并存的疼痛状况(中间风险因素)、表观遗传学、基因组学、环境和性别来解释疼痛表型。第一次在马里兰大学巴尔的摩校区，遗传学家、基因学家和疼痛研究人员将结合他们的专业知识来确定关键的新治疗靶点，这些靶点可以用来减少或消除 慢性疼痛。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): According to the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on Relieving Pain in America (2011), chronic pain is a public health epidemic affecting more than 116 million Americans and costing more than $600 billion per year in healthcare expenses and lost work productivity. More Americans suffer from pain than those afflicted with heart disease, diabetes and cancer combined. Despite recent advances in treatment, most people do not obtain adequate pain relief. An important focus has been on understanding the basic biology of chronic pain, so that new mechanistically based therapeutics can be developed. Unfortunately, standard research and development pipelines that start at the bench with several hundred known signaling pathways have not yielded many new targets in pain research. In a recent commentary, the NIH Director Francis Collins argued that these failures may be due to the feed-forward translational continuum from bench to beside that relies on biologically well-understood pathways. The result, in terms of drug development, is prolonged time to clinic, high failure rates and exorbitant cost. In this era of "omics" research, studies that incorporate geneti and genomic data may yield thousands of new, potentially druggable targets. The purpose of this Center for the Genomics of Pain is to combine rigorous phenotyping of pain and comorbid conditions with cutting edge genomics to more fully understand how individual differences can reduce or amplify pain. The Center's conceptual framework, adapted from Dr. William Maixner's model, incorporates comorbid pain conditions (intermediate risk factors), epigenetics, genomics, environment and gender to explain pain phenotypes. For the first time on the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus, geneticists, genomicists and pain researchers will combine their expertise to identify critical new therapeutic targets that can be exploited to reduce or eliminate chronic pain.