Pain & Analgesia

LSP investigators are developing novel non-opioid treatments for pain with greater long-term efficacy and lower potential for abuse.

Existing therapies for pain are often ineffective or liable to abuse, contributing to our current addiction and overdose crisis. Despite the interest in non-addictive alternatives, developing non-opioid analgesics remains one of the most challenging problems in contemporary drug discovery. 

To help solve this problem, LSP investigators use diverse cutting-edge systems pharmacology tools, including iPSC-derived neuronal drug screening, mass spectrometry proteomics, protein structure prediction and docking, computation-assisted synthesis planning, and advanced AI-assisted behavioral assays. This approach is target agnostic, aiming to understand the complex cellular interactions that underlie pain sensation and identify cell-based phenotypes that indicate nociceptor silencing. 

These efforts are part of an ambitious multi-institution project funded by DARPA (the Panacea Research Program), which aims to develop novel small molecules and biologics for treating chronic pain and inflammation while expanding computation-enabled methods for drug discovery.