IASP Global Year Lecture: Complexity of Pain Underlies Importance of Impact and Translation

Australian Pain Society Blog, 03 June 2022

The following is a summary from the 42nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the Australian Pain Society, which took place from April 10-13 in Hobart, Tasmania. Since 2019, the Meeting has featured a named plenary lecture on the International Association for the Study of Pain’s (IASP) Global Year Against Pain, an advocacy effort to raise awareness of pain. Professor Mark Hutchinson, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics and Professor within the Adelaide Medical School at the University of Adelaide, had the privilege of delivering the IASP Global Year Named Lecture for 2022. His research explores the “other brain”—or the other immune-like cells within the brain and spinal cord—and has implicated these cells in the action of drugs of dependence and the negative side effects of pain treatments. Keeping in line with the Global Year theme of translating pain knowledge into practice, Hutchinson spoke about his experiences with the Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics in taking science from the benchtop to the boardroom to translate more impact, and how these learnings can be applied to pain. Read more.