Oxford University joins the London Pain Consortium
18 Dec 07
Oxford University has joined the successful London Pain Consortium (LPC), a group funded by the Wellcome Trust which aims to develop a better understanding of chronic pain, and to seek new ways of treating its causes.
The London Pain Consortium, established in 2002, already includes researchers from Imperial College London, King’s College London, and University College London, and has been awarded a £5 million Strategic Award by the Wellcome Trust, to be complemented by over £1 million from the institutions involved in the consortium.
The consortium now includes Oxford University’s Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB), directed by Professor Irene Tracey. FMRIB is based within the Department of Clinical Neurology, and is a world-class MR imaging laboratory that integrates research into key neurological and neuroscientific problems with cutting edge developments in MR physics and data analysis.
Using fMRI scanners, which look for subtle changes in human brain activity related to pain perception, LPC researchers will explore the extensive changes that occur within the central nervous system in humans that lead to the development and maintenance of chronic pain states.
Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 adults, and the costs to society are huge, with an estimated 500 million lost working days in Europe, costing €34 billion a year, according to the European Pain Network.
Since it was established in 2002, the LPC has published over 280 scientific papers as well as developing new animals and human models for pain, creating a publicly available Pain Database and training more than 30 PhD students and post-doctoral scientists.