Grant: Project Grant

Pain is essential for our survival but diseases affecting it leave many Canadians suffering from chronic pain. Pain sensation is poorly understood and we are still struggling with very simple questions like how is pain in our bodies relayed to our brains. Many previous studies demonstrate that pain sensation is relayed to the brain via specific nerve tracts. We propose to use mouse genetic tools that label one such tract to generate a high resolution connectivity diagram of the pain system. We will also use these tools to inactivate a specific pain nerve pathway, and to study how this impacts normal pain sensation. The goal of these experiments is to assign a specific pain function to defined nerve pathways, in the hope that we could silence them to alleviate chronic pain without disrupting normal sensation.