University of Florida Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Center

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pain is the most common condition for which patients seek medical attention, and pain conditions represent the leading cause of disability worldwide. Chronic pain affects 100 million U.S. adults and produces financial costs exceeding $635 billion annually in direct healthcare expenses and loss of work productivity with chronic back pain representing the most dominant condition. Current best practices for diagnosing and treating chronic pain have yielded only limited success. Some treatment options, such as opioid medications for pain, have created devastating societal consequences evidenced by the raging national opioid addiction and overdose crisis. Despite rapidly increasing use of medications, injections, minimally invasive pain procedures and surgeries, functional disability has increased in recent decades. Further, we often cannot identify mechanisms to explain the major negative impact chronic pain has on the lives of many patients, which contributes to the very limited success of currently available interventions. Therefore, significant improvements in pain medicine are urgently warranted. A major barrier to developing new pain treatments has been the absence of infrastructure to facilitate well-designed and carefully conducted clinical trials to test the efficacy of promising treatments. Considering the current state of pain research and management, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has proposed to create the Early Phase Pain Treatment Investigation Clinical (EPPIC) Network, which will create a much-needed resource for conducting multi-center trials in an efficient and systematic manner. The University of Florida (UF) has an outstanding infrastructure for pain care and research with the capability to reach more than 50% of the population of Florida, the third most populous state of the US. We propose to create the UFHealth Specialized Clinical Center Network with UFHealth as ?Hub? and statewide partners serving as Spokes as part of the EPPIC-Net program. We will develop the UFHealth Specialized Clinical Center to have the capacity to successfully enroll patients with varying pain conditions into clinical trial protocols through its robust Hub infrastructure combined with multiple Spokes that further enhance enrollment capabilities. We also propose to participate actively in multi-center clinical trials of new interventions for acute and chronic pain conditions thought EPPIC-Net. The UFHealth Specialized Clinical Center intends to participate in multiple EPPIC-Net trials as supported by the considerable capacity of our Center. In addition, we will provide effective management and oversight of the UFHealth Specialized Clinical Center through a collaborative team leadership approach. Our leadership team will foster a collegial environment that encourages and values active engagement and participation from all Hub and Spoke collaborators. Our leadership approach will also be flexible and proactive in expanding the UFHealth Center through the recruitment of additional Spokes to meet the needs of EPPIC-Net and to disseminate research projects throughout the community. 1