Approved Research

Analysis of genetic, clinical and environmental factors from the UK Biobank to develop new approaches in the prevention and treatment of pain and pain-related diseases.

Lay summary

Nearly one-fifth of adults worldwide, or about 1.5 billion people, suffer from chronic pain (CP), which in turn is frequently associated with several comorbidities and a decrease in quality of life. Although there are many pain relieving drugs available, there is still a high need of anti-pain medication for a number of painful diseases. Side effects and risk of drug addiction are an issue with many available products. Grünenthal has a vision to create a world free of pain by developing novel, safe and differentiated treatments for patients suffering from pain

It is very important for our research to have access to a combination of human genetic data, detailed patient information about pain and other relevant environmental data. This is difficult to acquire, as most available public health and genetic data about pain is from family illnesses or from animal studies, which is often not comparable with the condition of most patients. With the UK Biobank's data on genetics, patient health records including pain phenotypes, biomarkers and environmental data it fills this gap and gives us the opportunity to explore new disease and treatment hypotheses for pain and related diseases.

To achieve this goal we want to explore genetic variation in the UK Biobank participants and the effect of those variations on pain and painful diseases to find genes that can be candidates for new pain treatments. This would also improve our understanding of pain diseases mechanisms in general. We plan the project to last at least 36 month, as disease progression over time it important for chronic pain diseases.