Pain in Animals Workshop (PAW) 2023
Annually millions of people and animals suffer from chronic and acute pain. The challenge is to accurately measure this pain in order to develop analgesics for treatment. Along with the welfare concerns of animals and people being in pain, there is the need to develop new and effective analgesic options that may offer alternatives to opioids.
The Pain in Animals Workshop (PAW) meetings are held every other year in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), bringing key stakeholders together to better understand pain in animals and humans. The 2-day workshop is open to academia, government, and industry experts in human and animal pain assessment, as well as analgesic intervention development.
Pain is universal, and biomedical researchers are constantly working towards safer and more effective treatment options. The ability to measure pain is fundamental to this goal and the ability to measure and interpret data from animal models – especially the naturally occurring models across different species – has the potential to enhance translational research and advance pain control in veterinary species. The 2023 workshop focused on updates on validated approaches to measuring pain, highlighting opportunity areas for additional outcome measure development, as well as study design and analytic approaches to the use of outcome measures in clinical trials (see agenda).
The presentations and discussions cover both companion animals (dogs, cats, horses) and production species, with comparative information from humans and rodents. It will be a truly comparative symposium!
Day 1 The morning covered validated approaches to measuring pain with the focus on new information available since the 2019 PAW meeting. The day began with the first annual Michele Sharkey Memorial Lecture, followed by discussions on the measurement properties of pain scoring instruments in farm animals, pain biomarkers, and the application of artificial intelligence/machine learning to large animal pain assessment. The afternoon focused on opportunities for biopsychosocial outcome measure development including discussions on the domains impacted by acute and chronic pain, as well as differentiation between the sensory and affective components of pain.
Day 2 The day focused on study design and analytic approaches to the utilization of outcome measures in clinical trials including defining clinically meaningful changes and success/failure criteria for outcome measures, as well as the use of composite endpoints and adaptive study designs.
Links to Recordings
•Day 1: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=52472
•Day 2: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=52508
Link to Proceedings
Find the workshop proceedings here.