Congratulations to Ben Alter, MD, PhD, whose K23 research proposal “Integrating Brain and Behavioral Measures of Central Pain Inhibition to Personalize Treatment in Chronic Pain Management” will be funded by the National Institutes of Health / National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Other project personnel include primary mentor Ajay Wasan, MD, MSc, and co-mentor Ted Huppert, PhD, from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
In his new career development award, Dr. Alter aims to improve the treatment of chronic pain by examining how central pain inhibition contributes to chronic pain, as well as patient-to-patient heterogeneity of pain treatment responses using novel brain and behavioral tools, including functional near-infrared spectroscopy and offset analgesia. The project will propel Dr. Alter towards independence in chronic pain patient-oriented research and allow him to conduct additional future studies to rigorously examine central pain inhibition as a predictive biomarker of treatment response. Novel brain and behavioral measures developed in this project may predict how patients respond to established analgesics, personalize chronic pain management, and accelerate the discovery and development of novel analgesics in phenotypically-defined patients.