Neuropathic pain is a distressing type of unresolved pain caused by nerve damage, severely impacting people’s quality of life. Unfortunately, common painkillers don’t always alleviate symptoms and are associated with unpleasant side effects. This means there’s a real and urgent need for researchers to develop new treatments to help the millions of people who suffer from this condition. In the U.S., it has been estimated that 10% of the population over age 40 experiences neuropathic pain1, almost the size of Texas at approximately 25 million people.2
One of the biggest obstacles researchers face when finding better treatments for neuropathic pain is the lack of knowledge from human physiology. Most research relies on animal models, cells, and tissue. However, animals models do not recapitulate all aspects of human disease, and many mechanisms discovered from animal models have failed to alleviate pain in humans. Therefore, a drug that has promising effects to minimize pain in mice may not have the same result for humans. This lack of human-specific research poses a challenge to developing tailored, effective treatments, and also limits our understanding of the human disease.
The development of innovative pain therapeutics requires access to human tissue. Researchers from around the world are increasing their efforts to obtain such samples with hopes that it will lead to the discovery of more effective pain remedies.
Currently, access to human peripheral tissues, including skin cells, nerves, and dorsal root ganglia are scarce, however, efforts to obtain such samples in an ethical manner are accelerating. As pain researchers around the world increasingly pivot from animal to human tissue, the need for laboratories to align on phenotyping, harmonized wet laboratory protocols, statistical design, reporting, and data sharing is vital.
Harmonizing neuropathic pain research involving human tissue samples could be compared to building a massive international railway system. If each country uses a different track width, train size, and signaling system, the trains will not be able to run smoothly across borders. Similarly, if scientists from around the world use different phenotyping methods, lab protocols, and data reporting standards, their findings cannot be compared reliably. Standardized and shared research practices allow scientific knowledge to flow freely, speeding up discovery and improve outcomes for patients everywhere.
To drive discovery, researchers need to work together to collect human tissue samples from people who have experienced chronic pain and from those who have not. These samples can then be matched with patient characteristics and compared, to gain insight on the underlying mechanisms of pain. To help make this happen, a group of 28 experts, including scientists, industry professionals, and patient representatives, met in London in March 2024. The meeting, funded by the European Union, aimed to create shared guidelines and improve cooperation across research teams to promote progress in this innovative field.
One of the 28 leading experts in London was Dr. Ted Price. Dr. Price is a Ashbel Smith Professor at UT Dallas and founding Director for the Center for Advanced Pain Studies (CAPS). With funding from NIH’s HEAL Initiative, his lab focuses on the molecular characterization of human pain-sensing neurons, chronic pain mechanisms, and the development of novel pain therapeutics.
Over the last several years, Dr. Price’s lab and CAPS have developed a relationship with the Southwest Transplant Alliance (STA), a non-profit organization dedicated to organ and tissue donation. This close relationship has allowed Dr. Price to become one of a handful of scientists across the world to have the privilege to study human tissue in pain research.
Dr. Ted Price, Ashbel Smith Professor and founding director of CAPS
“Our work in this area is built around the idea that we can use the most advanced technologies to build datasets from these organ donor derived tissues to advance the state of the science for the entire field. Our hope is that our remarkable relationship with the STA will enable us to more rapidly develop a better understanding of neuropathic pain, and to develop therapeutics. Importantly we know that we do not have all the answers, so we make all our data widely available through sensoryomics.com so that all researchers can access these resources and use them to follow their own ideas” says Dr. Price. “At the end of the day, our goal is to make neuropathic pain research better across the board, because we know people suffering from this terrible disease deserve better treatments”.
UT Dallas, CAPS, and our scientific collaborators are pioneering a new scientific foundation to fight against neuropathic pain. By collaborating on shared methods and standards in human tissue research, we believe the field can better understand the causes of neuropathic pain, discover more accurate markers of nerve damage and pain, and ultimately develop more effective, personalized treatments.
References
1. DiBonaventura MD, Sadosky A, Concialdi K, Hopps M, Kudel I, Parsons B, Cappelleri JC, Hlavacek P, Alexander AH, Stacey BR, Markman JD, Farrar JT. The prevalence of probable neuropathic pain in the US: results from a multimodal general-population health survey. J Pain Res. 2017 Nov 1;10:2525-2538. doi: 10.2147/JPR.S127014. PMID: 29138590; PMCID: PMC5677393.
2. United States Census Bureau. Texas. census.gov. Updated 2020. Accessed July 29, 2025. https://data.census.gov/profile/Texas?g=040XX00US48