Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain

The Challenge

Chronic pain is a major public health problem, and treatments are limited. More research is needed to fully understand how acute pain evolves into chronic pain, and who will transition from acute to chronic pain.

The Blueprint Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain seeks to shed light on the molecular, cellular and circuit-level changes – or neuroplasticity – underlying chronic pain. A key element of the program is to form research collaborations between experts on pain and experts on neuroplasticity.

Mechanisms of Support

The Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain supports research through:

Multi-PI R01 grants focused on understanding the maladaptive changes that occur during the transition from acute to chronic pain.
Competitive revisions that propose a collaborative, one year pilot study or a new specific aim associated with an active NIH grant. These initial studies are expected to lead to long term collaborations focused on chronic pain.

Funded Projects

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Title	PI	Institution	Grant Type
Altered Sensibility Following Peripheral Nerve Damage	Clifford Woolf	Children's Hospital Boston	Competitive revision
Cortico-striatal Plasticity in the Transition to Chronic Pain	Vania Apkarian	Northwestern University	Multi-PI R01
Epigenetic and Genetic Contributors to Chronic Neuropathic Pain	Allan Basbaum	University of California San Francisco	Multi-PI R01
Epigenetic Mechanisms of Neuropathic Pain	Hui-Lin Pan	University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center	Multi-PI R01
Hemichannels, Astrocytic Release, and Neuropathic Pain	Ru-Rong Ji	Duke University	Multi-PI R01
Mechanisms Regulating Vesicular Axonal Transport Following Nerve Injury	Valeria Cavalli	Washington University St. Louis	Competitive revision
Neuronal Subtype-Specific Plasticity in the Acute to Chronic Pain Transition	David Ginty	Johns Hopkins University	Multi-PI R01
Preventing Transition of Acute-to-Chronic Neuropathic Pain: Models, Mechanisms & Interventions	Linda Watkins	University of Colorado at Boulder	Multi-PI R01
Proteolysis of Myelin as a Source of Neuropathic Pain	Veronica Shubayev	University of California San Diego	Multi-PI R01
TSC2 and ERK signaling in Motor-Dependent Regeneration and Neuropathic Pain	Valeria Cavalli	Washington University St. Louis	Multi-PI R01
VGF, Critical Role in the Transition from Acute to Chronic Pain	Lyudmila Vulchanova	University of Minnesota Twin Cities	Multi-PI R01

NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research

Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain

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