Translational Pain Research: From Mouse to Man PDF

Preface

The progress and remarkable expansion of pain research in the past decade prompted Taylor & Francis executive Barbara Norwitz to inquire about a new edition of their now decade-old Methods in Pain Research. The query was serendipitously timed to coincide with a highly successful session at the 2007 Spring Brain Conference in Sedona, Arizona, at which Jeff Kennedy had organized a session presenting the progress and ideas driving a burgeoning expansion of research programs in the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on translational aspects of pain research. Despite the general dominance of scientific meetings by researchers in academia, the impact of Big Pharma revealed a trend presaging a new era in which the practical consequences of basic research at the level of molecular biology was becoming relevant to clinical aspects of pain therapy and control. The industry refers to such studies as preclinical. While methodology continues to advance, and some spectacular new twists have emerged in the past decade, the gradual shift to "translation" of basic science knowledge to its applications relevant to the human condition appears to have become an important trend in pain research.

Translation in modern biomedical parlance seems approximately equivalent to applied-and not necessarily from animals to humans, because the reverse can occur. The earliest attempts at uncovering cerebral localization by producing focal cerebral lesions in dogs were published by the French military surgeon Francois Pourfour du Petit in 1710, based on post-mortem observations of head wounds and related neurological deficits in soldiers-something akin to a "retrograde translation." Surprisingly, the earliest prominent example of translation that we have uncovered does not employ the word but expresses the concept-the discovery by Edward Jenner that cowpox could provide a vaccine to protect humans from the serious rampant scourge of smallpox in the late 18th century.

A congratulatory letter to Jenner from Thomas Jefferson (from the University of Virginia Archive) reveals the following unexpected judgment: