Grant: Canada Research Chairs

There is a critical unmet medical need to treat human and animal patients suffering from chronic pain leading to functional impairment. Animal health, welfare and pain management is at the heart of our mission in veterinary medicine. Developing new therapeutics for pain management is a challenge because it requires the use of experimental animal models, where we induce pain. There are numerous limitations, including ethical considerations, technical challenges and cost. Therefore, it is imperative to develop new strategies leading to a paradigm shift in how we develop new therapeutics to alleviate pain. Molecular fingerprinting for precision therapies is the heart of precision medicine. This new paradigm is a departure from the “one-size-fits-all” traditional approach and prioritizes patient characteristics (i.e. molecular and phenotypic). Specifically, a comprehensive molecular profiling using proteomic technologies of characterized patients can be used to develop targeted and more specific pain therapies to improve clinical outcomes in veterinary patients and improve the translation of analgesic drugs to the clinic. This is a tremendous opportunity to make remarkable advancements in knowledge, since naturally occurring disease studies in animals have more translational value to other animal species and humans. The Canada research chair in metrology of bioactive molecule and target discovery mission will be to methodically characterize the molecular signature of veterinary patients suffering from chronic pain and identify new bioactive molecules and their targets to design innovative pain relief strategies to improve animal welfare and strengthen the translation of analgesic drugs to the clinic. The Research Chair will have three axes: 1) Perform comprehensive characterizations of the molecular signatures that underlie chronic and inflammatory pain; 2) Develop innovative mass spectrometry analytical strategies with increased detection sensitivity to precisely study protein target engagement and identify new bioactive molecules and new targets; 3) Develop and validate alternatives and high-throughput methods to evaluate the efficacy of drug candidates using Caenorhabditis elegans to meet ethical objectives and broaden the number of candidates tested. We strive to develop innovative solutions to resolve unmet needs in the drug treatment of chronic pain.