Bath Pain Forum with Allan Bas

Allan Basbaum, professor and chair of the Department of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, will talk about research looking at chronic pain as a ‘disease’ of the nervous system.

Dr Basbaum received his BSc from McGill University, where he worked with Ronald Melzack, his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and did postdoctoral research with Patrick Wall at University College London. He has served as Treasurer of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and from 2003-2012 he was Editor-in-Chief of PAIN, the journal of the IASP. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the US National Academy of Medicine. He is also a fellow of the British Academy of Medical Sciences and of the Royal Society in the UK.

What will Dr Basbaum’s presentation be about?

Many chronic pain conditions result from alterations in how the CNS processes injury messages. In this respect chronic pain is a “disease” of the nervous system, rather than a symptom of other conditions. We study mechanisms by which tissue and nerve injuries induce chronic pain, including the genes that code for molecules that transmit injury messages.

Recently, we initiated parallel studies that examine the circuits that underlie the production of itch which, like pain, is a stimulus-evoked, highly motivating perception. With the objective of long term management of chronic pain and itch, we are transplanting inhibitory cell precursors into the spinal cord to determine whether re-establishing inhibitory control circuitry lost after injury can treat the “disease” of chronic pain and itch. To date we have shown that the cells indeed integrate into the host and can ameliorate the persistent pain and itch associated with nerve damage.

About the Bath Pain Forum

The Pain Forum was launched in 2000 after the recognition that pain was of interest to a large number of healthcare professionals in the greater Bath area. These meetings have been well supported by clinicians in the local area. We invite world leaders in pain research to present their work and discuss developments. These speakers are chosen for the high quality of their research and their ability to communicate it well.

Since 2015, Pain Forum has been supported by the Integrated Pain Management Health Integration Team (IPM HIT) which covers the Bath and Bristol area. Once a year, the Pain Forum is held in Bristol.

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