EPIONE: Effective Pain Interventions with Neural Engineering
EPIONE
Effective Pain Interventions with Neural Engineering
Chronic pain is one of the great unmet needs in medicine. The scale of the problem is illustrated by several data fundamentals: it is the leading global cause of disability; it has an economic burden estimated to exceed heart disease and cancer combined; and it is a root cause of the opioid crisis, killing 130 people per day in the US alone. Importantly, chronic pain is a disease in its own right and often emerges as a maladaptation of the brain’s intrinsic machinery for bodily protection and recovery from disease and injury. Conventional research has focused on drug discovery, but there have been few major breakthroughs in pain drugs for several decades.
The EPIONE programme aims to use engineering to support a new generation of therapeutic technologies to solve the problem. The programme adopts a control systems approach, bringing together an interdisciplinary expert team from different domains of engineering, with neuroscientists, clinicians, and lived-experience partners. The team will work together to identify new technological strategies to reduce symptomatic pain by directly modulating information processing in the brain. This approach builds a technological framework that combines sensor systems, different interventions to control brain activity (invasively and non-invasively), adaptive control algorithms, and precise pain network targeting.
Several key features distinguish the programme from what has been previously attempted, highlighting the state-of-the-art innovations that underscore the strength of the team. This includes developing new methods to modulate brain activity, the use of computer models of the pain system to guide points of intervention, developing the ability to target multiple parts of the brain at once; and the use of closed-loop systems that continually adjust therapy according to patient specific needs.
A research grant funded jointly by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
