The 140th Annual Meeting of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (Kyoto)

Organizers: Makoto Tsuda (Grad Sch Pharm, Kyushu Univ), Norimitsu Morioka (Grad Sch BioMed Health Sci, Hiroshima Univ)

Neuropathic pain, a highly debilitating chronic pain state that occurs after nerve damage caused by a wide variety of conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, viral infection and cancer chemotherapy, affects millions of individuals worldwide. Optimal treatment of such chronic pain is a major clinical challenge because the underlying mechanisms remain unclear and currently available treatments are frequently ineffective. It is becoming clear that chronic pain is not simply a consequence of temporal continuity of acute nociceptive signals, but rather of anatomical and functional alterations in the nervous system. A growing body of evidence has shown that glial cells in the peripheral and central nervous system have crucial roles in pathologically altered neuronal function associated with chronic pain. In this symposium, we have four speakers who have been actively working at the front-line of the fields of pain and glia research and have discovered new mechanisms underlying chronic pain using cutting-edge research techniques including in vivo imaging. Each speaker will show the latest, interesting findings about the chronic pain mechanisms focusing on the role of glial cells in the peripheral nerve, spinal cord and brain and will also discuss the concept for drug discovery, the future subjects and research perspectives.