Pain: Why does it exist, how does it work and how can we more effectively treat it?

Professor Ewan St. John Smith - A V Hill Lecture

• 11 November 2024, 18:00 – 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre

Upcoming event Booking Recommended Michaelmas Term

• Event cost: Free
• Disabled access?: Yes
• Booking required: No

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Overview

The sensation of pain is one which nearly everyone is familiar with, usually being considered an unpleasant experience. Wouldn’t a life without pain be better? Drawing on human genetics and the wider animal kingdom, we shall see that there are in fact benefits to pain, or rather nociception, the neural process encoding noxious stimuli. Pain is not however static. For example, following an accident, the injured part of the body becomes more sensitive, a phenomenon that usually resolves as the injury heals. Understanding the molecular processes by which pain functions and how the sensitivity in the system changes under different conditions is important for the development of novel therapeutics to treat the chronic pain, such as that associated with osteoarthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, endometriosis, and a wealth of other conditions. Looking to potential new therapeutic avenues, we will discuss what can be learned from studying human genetics and extremophile organisms, such as the naked mole-rat, as well what the future holds regard gene- and cell-based therapy.

Biography

Prof. Ewan St. John Smith is Professor of Nociception and Deputy Head of the Department of Pharmacology and a Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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A.V. Hill Lecture

Archibald Vivian Hill (1886-1977) FRS was an English physiologist, one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Phusiology or Medicine for his elucidation of the production of heat and mechanical work in muscles. Hill is regarded, along with Hermann Helmholz, as one of the founders of biophysics.

The first AV Hill Lecture was delivered in 2013 by Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University.

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