The BonePainII Consortium was strongly represented at the Pain Mechanisms and Therapeutics Conference in Verona 2022. Dr Kirsty Bannister, Associate Professor at King’s College London, UK, and member of the BonePainII Consortium is one of the two organizers of the conference. Members of the BonePainII network chaired three sessions and gave six talks at the conference and a PhD student from the first BonePain Network, who is now a Postdoctoral Researcher, presented his work. 234 delegates participated in the conference.
The Pain Mechanisms and Therapeutics Conference
It is a European conference, which is held every second year. It is a key conference in the international pain research and therapeutics community. The conference did not take place in Sicily in Italy 2020 as planned due to the pandemic. After being postponed first to 2021 and then changed to take place in Verona 2022 instead, the Pain Mechanisms and Therapeutics conference went ahead in Verona, Italy, on 29 to 3 June 2022, as a physical meeting.
BonePainII at this year’s conference
Dr Bannister kick-started the conference together with the other organizer, Professor Frank Porreca from the University of Arizona in the US. She chaired the first session on “Higher brain centre and brainstem influences on descending modulatory controls” on the first day and gave a talk on “Descending modulatory controls; molecular mechanisms and translational value” in this session.
Another session on “Neuroimmune interactions” was also chaired by a member of the BonePainII Consortium, Dr Shafaq Sikandar, Senior Lecturer at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, UK. In addition, Dr Sikandar presented her work on “An immunological basis for chronic widespread pain in mice and men” in this session, which also featured a talk by another member of the BonePainII network, Dr Iain Chessell, Global Head of Neuroscience, BioPharmaceuticals Research and Development, at AstraZeneca. His talk was entitled “Progress in the clinic with a novel bi-specific therapy”. BonePainII was also strongly represented at the conference at a dedicated session on bone pain.
A dedicated bone pain session
Dr Niels Eijkelkamp, Associate Professor at University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, and member of the BonePainII Consortium had submitted a proposal for a session dedicated to the mechanisms of bone pain at the conference. The proposal was accepted, and Dr Eijkelkamp chaired the session on bone pain. It featured talks by a number of members of the BonePainII network. The Coordinator of the network Dr Anne-Marie Heegaard, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, opened the session with a talk on “Translational research in cancer-induced bone pain”, while Professor Camilla Svensson from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden presented her work on “Beyond inflammation; role of osteoclasts in persistent pain in rheumatoid arthritis”.
Following this, Niels Eijkelkamp’s presentation was on the topic of “Neuron-macrophage crosstalk in control of persistent osteoarthritis pain”. Dr Mateusz Kucharczyk gave the last talk in the bone pain session on “Mechanosensation in bone cancer pain”. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at King’s College London, UK, and was a PhD student in the first BonePain network. There was a lot of interest in the bone pain session and the talks sparked fruitful discussions. The bonepain session is outlined below. The full programme for the conference is available here.
The next Pain Mechanisms and Therapeutics Conference takes place in Verona on 19-24 May 2024.
