Greater insight into basic biology of pain will reveal non-addictive remedies
Specifically, they call for a shift in emphasis in drug development towards understanding how people differ in their response to pain medications to develop more precise, safer, and less addictive treatments. "Pain is a syndrome that is poorly understood and research on pain is poorly resourced relative to its preva¬lence and cost, especially in terms of shattered lives and lost productivity," writes Tilo Grosser, MD, an associate professor of Pharmacology, and Garret A. FitzGerald, MD, FRS, director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at Penn, along with Clifford J. Woolf, from the Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. This plan is especially urgent given no analgesic drugs directed at novel targets have been approved in the past five years. The authors reason that the opioid epidemic has attained the scale of the HIV/AIDS epidemic at its peak in the mid-1990s, and that a massive and diversified effort by multiple stakeholder...