In an effort to address the critical public health need for new, safer and more effective medicines to treat pain, a consortium based at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP) at Harvard Medical School has launched an ambitious project titled STOP PAIN (Safe Therapeutic Options for Pain and Inflammation).
By combining a wide range of experimental and artificial intelligence-driven approaches, the consortium aims to identify compounds that selectively block the activity of nociceptors—the sensory neurons that sense and initiate pain—with the goal of developing new, preclinical drug candidates that offer an alternative to the opioid-based medications at the heart of the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The project is led by researchers from HMS and Boston Children’s Hospital, with collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Germany.
It is supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through the Panacea program, which aims to engender new therapies that address under-met medical needs of active duty soldiers and veterans. The DARPA cooperative agreement includes funding of up to $23,378,281.
