Story Landis

Transcription

[Music] [Dr. Story Landis speaking] NINDS was asked by Dr. Francis Collins who's the director of NIH to serve as the lead Institute for pain and that means that we're responsible for hosting the Pain Consortium and virtually every Institute and center at the National Institutes of Health funds pain research. For example the National Cancer Institute is very interested in understanding pain after cancer treatment or during cancer. NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse is particularly interested in how drugs that influence perception of pain act and developing better drugs. And my Institute the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke we're particularly interested in in actually broad range research about the underlying biological mechanisms that serve pain and understanding how we might better understand the circuits and intervene in them. Now obviously this is all gonna work better if the different institutes supporting pain research understand what each of them is doing and can coordinate and work together to make sure that we do the best possible job in supporting pain research. We have supported particular funding opportunity announcements that target particular kinds of pain or ways of thinking about pain, like chronic overlapping pain conditions. We've sponsored workshops and symposia that bring scientists together to understand what are the big unsolved problems. In addition we've also this month which is Pain Awareness Month focused on a major effort to raise awareness in the American public about pain and that's included Twitter chats and a radio tour with several people participating in local radio shows answering questions from the audience and talking about and NIH, and pain and pain research. So we have a a broad range of activities that the pain consortium has undertaken.