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Original Publication Date
2026
Document Type
Presentation
Abstract
With chronic pain affecting 60 million Americans, translation of preclinical research to effective therapies remains under 1% due to mismatched pain assessment methods. While animal studies evaluate reflexive responses, clinical assessments rely on subjective pain scales. This research investigates physical and cognitive performance measures as unified endpoints across species, focusing on bladder pain syndrome. Preliminary findings confirm functional deficits in both animal models and humans, offering a objective, translatable framework to accelerate non-opioid pain drug discovery.
Accessibility Note
Content is digitally accessible 2026.
Transcription
Next we have Naomi Carter from the School of Medicine, New Ways to Assess Old Pain. Their advisor is Dr. Steve Negus. I have a question for you. When was the last time you were in pain? Before you answer, I'm not talking about your most recent trip to the DMV. While pain can be an unpleasant emotional experience, I want you to focus on a physical experience, like a broken bone that took months to heal. So I'll ask again, when was the last time you were in pain? I ask because you have a 1 in 3 chance of joining 60 million Americans with chronic pain. Chronic pain that interferes with your exercise, sleep, mood, and relationships, and that lasts on average for over 10 years. Your options to manage this chronic pain are A, potent opioids that put you at risk for addiction, and B, non-opioid therapies that may not control your pain at all. Fortunately for you, the NIH invests over $900 million annually in pain research, and every year we find new therapies that reduce pain in animals. So what's the problem? These therapies seem to only reduce pain in animals, and less than one percent receive FDA approval to treat pain in people. Well, you don't want to be in chronic pain. So how do we fix this? We think that new pain therapies tend to work in animals and not in humans, because we measure pain differently in animals and in humans. In animals, we measure pain by introducing something painful, like a pinprick or hot water, and we observe the animal's reflexive response. In people, we measure pain by just asking them to rate their pain on a scale from 1 to 10. But this won't work. We can't ask animals to rate their pain, and we don't want to introduce something painful to people. Thus, it's painfully clear that we need a new way to measure pain that works in animals and in humans, so we can identify new pain therapies that also work in both. So how can we measure pain in animals and in humans? Well, across a wide range of chronic pain conditions, low back pain, migraine, to do a few, we see a decrease in physical and cognitive performance. We see this in animal models of a chronic pain condition and in people with a chronic pain condition. My dissertation research aims to replicate these studies in bladder pain syndrome, an understudied but impactful chronic pain condition that hasn't seen a new therapy since the 1900s. Bladder pain syndrome is exactly what it sounds like, pain that you feel is coming from your bladder. We measured physical performance by seeing if subjects can use muscles close to the bladder to perform specific movements. We measured cognitive performance by having subjects complete a learned task in response to a cue or signal. While we're still collecting data, our current results show a decrease in physical and cognitive performance in animal models of bladder pain syndrome and a decrease in physical performance in people with bladder pain syndrome. This might not be as painful as we thought. We anticipate that the use of physical and cognitive performance to measure pain in animals and in humans will accelerate the discovery of new pain therapies that help keep you pain-free.
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Comments
First place winner of the 12th Annual VCU 3MT® Competition, held on October 9, 2026.