Pain Management: Targets, Products, and Translational Medicine - An Animal Health and Nutrition Forum

Like humans, animals experience a wide range of chronic pain from conditions such as arthritis, muscle strain and nerve damage, but in veterinary medicine, chronic pain is not well understood and often underdiagnosed. Treating animals for pain has strong translational potential, canine and feline osteoarthritis is strikingly similar to human osteoarthritis. The AH&N EG forum will discuss the challenges of translational medicine in this area and the opportunity animal models present to understand pathways, identify new targets and build tools to identify new products for AH, as well as the industry’s perspective on therapeutic targets for pain.

John Cary, Director Veterinary Corporate Partnerships, Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health  

Dr. Cary obtained his DVM credentials from Texas A&M University. He has worked with Novartis Animal Health as Professional Services Veterinarian and as a Manager of Technical Services. At BI, where he has been since 2005, he has held many titles. He has been responsible for creating veterinary technical call center to support the pet and equine segments. Other species, including cattle were later added to the call center. He is currently responsible for managing corporate partnerships with other industry partners and academic institutions.

B. Duncan X. Lascelles, Professor of Surgery and Pain Management; Director, Comparative Pain Research and Education Centre, Translational Research in Pain Programme, North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine 

Dr. Lascelles' research program (Translational Research in Pain [TRiP]) is dedicated to answering critical questions about pain control and pain mechanisms through high quality, innovative research. His career has been focused on developing algometry methods (methods to measure pain) in spontaneous disease animal models (pets with naturally occurring disease), and probing tissues from well-phenotyped animals with spontaneous disease to understand the neurobiology, with a strong translational focus. The aim of his research is to improve pain control in companion animals, and facilitate analgesic development in human medicine. He has authored over 180 peer-reviewed research papers and reviews and 190 research abstracts, as well as over 30 book chapters.  He has worked closely with industry partners in both animal and human health, helping to re-define the relationship between industry and academia. Through reviews and invited presentations, he advocates for the use of spontaneous disease in animals to inform human therapeutic development. Recently, he organized a meeting of industry, academia, regulatory authorities (FDA) and the NIH to discuss measurement of chronic pain in companion animals and the application to human pain research (www.PAW2017.com), and is planning PAW2019. He is completing a year-long integrated sabbatical within a pain therapeutic company (Centrexion Therapeutics) that develops novel therapeutics for both humans and animals. He provides consulting services related to pain therapeutic development across all stages of animal therapeutic development and for pre-clinical and Phase I stages of human therapeutic development.