Chronic pain in the skeleton presents major health challenges to a wide range of demographics throughout the world. Furthermore, as individuals around the world are living longer, it is expected that the burden of age-related bone disorders will continue to increase.
Pain is an essential component of successful skeletal healing, reducing the risk of further injury during the healing process. However, if pain becomes uncontrollable and long lasting, it can have a significant negative impact on the patient’s quality of life. Chronic skeletal pain is caused by a remarkably diverse group of disorders ranging from traumatic fractures, cancer metastases to bone, multiple myeloma, and others. What they share in common though is a lack of therapies that can fully control the pain without significant, unwanted side effects.
Given these considerable health concerns, our research aims to:
• Develop clinically relevant models of cancer- and fracture-induced bone pain
• Investigate the mechanisms that drive age-related bone loss
• Understand the cellular and neurologic mechanisms that generate and drive chronic skeletal pain
• Evaluate the effects that novel therapeutics have on skeletal pain and disease progression