Surrogate pain models

In addition to pain bio-markers a variety of surrogate pain models can be applied to mimic symptoms observed in chronic pain patients and act as proxies for clinical drug effects. Hence healthy volunteers can transiently by such models express clinical relevant symptoms (e.g. hyperalgesia, allodynia, spread of pain, spreading sensitisation) and the effect of drugs on such symptoms/mechanisms can be studied quantitatively under standardised conditions.

 

Surrogate pain models and related symptoms.

Such models can mimic a variety of clinical symptoms such as:

• Tissue and modality specific spontaneous pain

• Tissue and modality specific peripheral sensitisation

• Inflammatory induced sensitisation

• Non-inflammatory induced sensitisation

• Tissue specific inflammatory processes

• Central sensitisation

• Inflammatory/non-inflammatory induced

• Tissue and modality specific hyperalgesia

• Inflammatory/non-inflammatory induced

• Tissue and modality specific allodynia

• Tissue and modality specific wind-like pain (temporal summation)

• Tissue and modality specific spatial summation

• Wind-up like pain and aftersensation

• Spreading pain and sensitisation

• Referred pain

• Impaired descending pain control

 

Translating experimental pain data

The C4Pain multi-modal, multi-tissue, multi-mechanism pain assessment paradigm for profiling new and existing compounds includes induction and assessment of peripheral, spinal and supra-spinal mechanisms. The acquired mechanism related knowledge and target validation transferred from one trial to the other ensures the most optimal primary outcome parameter is selected and the pain mechanisms of importance thoroughly evaluated (target validation) at all phases of development providing more successful development programs. Such studies qualify the decision of which patient (sub-) population should be selected for later large clinical trials.