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Chronic pain, a leading global cause of disability, is one of the great unmet needs in medicine. In the UK alone, between one-third and one-half of the adult population (just under 28 million) are affected by chronic pain, costing health services millions in direct treatment, with indirect costs in lost productivity estimated to be billions. But despite its scale, progress in chronic pain treatments has stalled with few major breakthroughs in drug therapies for several decades.
The EPIONE (Effective Pain Interventions with Neural Engineering) programme will tackle this by combining world-leading engineering and neuroscience expertise to transform how chronic pain is managed.
World-first interdisciplinary innovations
Unlike conventional drug discovery, EPIONE will use a systems engineering approach to target the brain’s own pain networks. Chronic pain is increasingly recognised as a disease of the nervous system itself, often caused by errors in how the brain processes signals during injury or illness. By combining advanced sensor systems, neuromodulator technologies, adaptive control algorithms, and precise pain network targeting, EPIONE will result in novel therapies that directly modulate brain activity to reduce or even abolish pain.
Co-led by Professor Tim Denison (Department of Engineering Science) and Professor Ben Seymour (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience), EPIONE will combine expertise in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and clinical medicine with input from patients who live with chronic pain, who will play a key role in shaping the design of new interventions. This broad expertise will enable the team to develop state-of-the art personalised technologies that are fundamentally different to any current chronic pain treatments.
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.