Linda Watkins, a professor and researcher in the University of Colorado at Boulder's psychology department and Center for Neuroscience, has won a national award in part for her continuing work to stop chronic pain.
The American Pain Society will honor Watkins with its 2005 F.W.L. Kerr Memorial Award on April 2 during the organization's national meeting in Boston. The $10,000 award recognizes Watkins' achievements and contributions to the field of pain research over the span of her career.
Watkins' research focuses on glial cells, which together with neurons make up the central nervous system. She believes they hold the key to the puzzle of controlling chronic pain, and that this finding opens up a whole new avenue for pain research.
In December 2003, CU signed a licensing agreement with the biotech company Avigen Inc. of Alameda, Calif., allowing Watkins' research team and Avigen to work jointly to develop the novel gene therapy and to determine if a clinical trial for humans is feasible in the near future.
Watkins and her collaborators at CU-Boulder and Avigen also recently were awarded a $1.8 million Cutting Edge Biomedical Research Award from the National Institutes of Health to continue their research.
If successfully developed, the treatment could bring relief to the millions of Americans who suffer from chronic pain, a debilitating condition that makes it extremely painful to do anything from taking a shower to putting on a shirt.
"The problem with chronic pain is the drugs that are out there now just don't work for chronic pain, so people suffer for years with little relief," Watkins said.
Until recently, pain research focused exclusively on neurons, which relay pain messages to the brain. For example, for a broken foot, people take drugs that interrupt the neurons' pain message.
But these treatments do little to control chronic pain. During the past decade, Watkins and others discovered that treating pain is not just about neurons but also involves glial cells, which are active in creating and maintaining pain. Long thought to be just the "housecleaners" in the central nervous system, glial cells were ignored by pain researchers who thought of them only as supporting cells.
Watkins said the "pain pathway" can no longer be thought of as a simple chain of neurons. Under normal conditions, glial cells function quietly in their support role. But Watkins and her research team have found through their work with rats and cell cultures that when activated by a particular virus like HIV or in response to nerve damage, glia spurt pain chemicals that amplify pain.
"Just as a seething crowd eggs on boxers in the ring, glial cells can egg on neurons in the pain pathway," Watkins said. "This drives the creation and maintenance of chronic pain."
Controlling the process, she said, is the key to soothing chronic pain. To bring the glial cells under control, Watkins and her team are working on a gene therapy treatment where patients would receive the DNA for interleukin-10, or IL-10, through a nonsurgical injection near the spinal cord every few months. The injection will selectively make the spinal cord overproduce IL-10, a protein that specifically targets glial cells and turns them off. When you do that, Watkins said, chronic pain goes away.
Watkins' pain research began while she was trying to understand if and how the immune system "talks" to the brain. She found that when a person gets sick, the immune system takes command, changing how the brain works. This immune-driven change in brain function creates what is called the "sickness response," which includes fever, increased sleep, increased pain and many other changes all too familiar to anyone who has suffered from the flu.
The American Pain Society is a professional organization with more than 3,300 members, including physicians, pharmacists, psychologists and others who study and treat pain. Headquartered in Glenview, Ill., and founded in 1978, the society strives to advance pain-related research, education, treatment and professional practice.