Description
Pain research currently faces translational crisis, with few preclinical studies translating to new pain medicines. In this talk, Dr. Ma will discuss a new anatomical and functional subdivision of the somatosensory system: one for detecting external threats and driving reflective-defensive reactions to prevent or limit injury, and the other for monitoring internal body injury that produces affective tonic pain and drives self-caring response to reduce suffering. With this circuit-level segregation, he argues that reflexive-defensive assays may not necessarily be able to detect selective loss of clinically more relevant pain, and their wide use by the pain field could contribute to poor translational success.
Contributors
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Qiufu Ma, PhD
Dr. Qiufu Ma received his BS from Fudan University in 1987 and PhD from UCLA in early 1994. After postdoctoral training with Dr. David Anderson at Caltech, he became an Assistant Professor at Harvard neurobiology Department and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and become a full Professor in 2011. His lab has been working on the somatic sensory circuits. Major contributions include the identification of key transcription factors controlling sensory cell type specification and circuit formation. In past 10 years, his lab has been using genetic tools to map spinal circuits transmitting pain or itch. Most recently, the lab starts to map circuits driving somato-autonomic reflexes, as a way to understand how acupuncture work.
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Claudia Sommer, MD
Claudia Sommer is a Professor of Neurology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. She received training in psychiatry, neuropathology, experimental anesthesia, and neurology. At the University of Würzburg, she serves as a consultant in neurology, organizes an outpatient clinic for patients with pain, and leads the Peripheral Nerve Laboratory. Research interests are the role of inflammation in the pathophysiology of neuropathic pain, improvement and standardization of diagnostic biopsies, and the pathophysiology of antibody-mediated diseases. She has written more than 200 original research papers and more than 100 reviews and book-chapters and edited several books. Dr. Sommer is active in the development of national and international guidelines on the fibromyalgia syndrome, on nerve and skin biopsies, diagnosis and treatment of peripheral neuropathies, neuropathic and facial pain. She is an IASP councilor and is president elect of the German IASP Chapter (Deutsche Schmerzgesellschaft e.V.). She is a reviewer for scientific journals, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals.