From Molecules to Patients, From Mechanisms to Treatments: Neuropathic Pain in Its Global Year

SIG Name: Neuropathic Pain (NeuPSIG)

Description of Symposium: While IASP puts a special focus on neuropathic pain through the “Global Year”, we want to shine an interdisciplinary light on the continued challenge of understanding and treating an elusive condition. As evidenced in our 2025 updated guidelines, effective and safe treatments are still missing, with well-established medications only leading to sufficient pain relief in a fraction of patients. In this satellite, we aim to bring together all parts of the NeuPSIG, from bench scientists to clinicians, from senior leaders of the field to early career scientists.
The symposium will be structured into three main blocks: updates from mechanistic studies and understanding neuropathic pain in the lab; translating knowledge from cells and animal studies to humans; and applying state-of-the-art understanding to treating patients (non-)pharmacologically.
Each block will be chaired by a senior leader of the field and the NeuPSIG. We will have four brief presentations for each block, allowing for a fully balanced mix covering geographical, gender-, and career-level representation. We will recruit this speaker team through the NeuPSIG congress 2025 and by reviewing poster abstracts for the World Congress.

Intended Audience: Cross-disciplinary, Clinical Research, Translational Research, Basic Science

Educational Objectives:

• List state-of-the-art approaches to unravel the molecular mechanisms of neuropathic pain,
• Describe challenges and advances in translating these into human studies,
• Outline the best pharmacological and non-pharmacological management strategies for neuropathic pain, and how they are informed by mechanistic research.

Speakers

Patrick Dougherty University of Texas
USA

My research interests throughout my career have centered on gaining an understanding of the neurochemical and physiological consequences of peripheral and neural injury or inflammation on neural activity in the CNS. Several key contributions have been made. The most recent work in my laboratory is focused on gaining an understanding of the neurochemical and physiological mechanisms of pain in cancer patients. This research emphasizes defining pain producing mechanisms that will lead to interventions for chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain and cancer-related hyperalgesia. The on-going work is composed of three sets of clinical studies in patients and two major lines of complementary studies conducted in laboratory animals. The goal of the clinical studies is to define the sensory nerve fibers that are involved in the generation of neuropathic pain as a consequence of cancer and cancer chemotherapy. This research line is among the first where quantitative sensory examination techniques have been combined with skin biopsy to explore the specific nerve fiber types that are impaired in patients with chronic chemoneuropathy. This line of work was also the first to show that cancer itself is a contributing factor to neuropathy prior to any cancer treatment and that latent differences in distal innervation is another important factor. Very recent work has focused on the anatomic, physiological and transcriptomic changes occurring in human dorsal root ganglia when isolated from dermatomes affected by neuropathic pain. This work has established that the development of ectopic spontaneous activity in DRG neurons drives on-going pain and that the underlying molecular mechanisms are sexually dimorphic.

Franziska Denk King's College London
UK

Franziska Denk is a Reader at King’s College London, where she works on neuro-immune-stromal cell interactions in the context of chronic pain. Her lab uses transgenic models, stem cell derived human cell culture systems and high-throughput molecular analyses (https://www.franziskadenk.com/, @denklab.bsky.social, www.linkedin.com/in/franziska-denk-a9851783).

Franziska’s team is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the MRC, the European Union, industry and several charities. Her group is passionate about data sharing (Denk, Nature, 2017) and interdisciplinary research in an open, positive research culture.

Pall Karlsson Aarhus University
Denmark

Páll Karlsson, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Danish Pain Research Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark. Páll holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from University of Iceland, a master‘s degree in molecular biology from Aarhus University, and a PhD and DMSc from the Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University from 2013 and 2024, respectively. He has been at employed at the Pain Research Centre since 2010 and is the group leader of Molecular mechanisms at the centre. His work is centered around the structure and function of small nerve fibres and understanding why some, but not all, patients with neuropathies develop neuropathic pain. Páll lives outside Aarhus with his wife, two daughters and two mischievous cats: Lucky and Hope.

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