Hartford Business Journal

16 Hartford Business Journal • July 16, 2018 • www.HartfordBusiness.com By Matt Pilon mpilon@HartfordBusiness.com M edical science is a noble calling, but it's often extremely com- petitive, and the next batch of research funding is always top of mind. To succeed, researchers must seize advantages when they see them, says Dr. William Zempsky, head of the pain and palliative medicine division at Connecticut Children's Medical Center (CCMC) and a professor at the UConn School of Medicine. That may mean carving out a niche in a field of study that isn't quite as crowded. Call it low-hanging fruit, but the kind that could one day change patients' lives. "That's how you develop a career," Zempsky said. "Researchers, just like everybody else, are opportunists." Indeed, as Zempsky tells it, that's part of the story of how he built his own career. "When I first started here, I was probably the only one doing pain research across much of the UConn campus," he said. He opted to specialize in sickle cell disease and look for ways to evaluate and treat the severe, unrelenting pain it causes. It was a rare niche at the time, and to an extent it still is. But research on pain, and potential remedies to treat and deal with it, will be ratcheting up in the state with the launch of a new research and education consortium that could potentially make Connecti- cut ground zero in this area of medical study. The Connecti- cut Pain Con- sortium is being led by Reinhard Laubenbacher, a UConn Medical School cell and computational biol- ogy professor who heads the college's Center for Quantitative Medicine. He's been brainstorming for the past few years how he might make a bigger mark on the research world. "In pain research, it's still by and large wide open," Laubenbacher said. That could be slowly changing, as the opioid epidemic brings urgency to pain science and the need for alterna- tive treatments. Congress responded recently by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars in additional pain research and addiction funding. The hope is to bring some of that funding to Connecticut. So far, members of the fledgling consortium include UConn Health and Jackson Laboratory, where Lauben- bacher also holds a faculty position. The hope is to secure further commitments from universities, hospitals, insurers, and perhaps drug companies, follow- ing a pain sympo- sium planned for later this year Laubenbacher already has an ad- vocate in Zempsky at CCMC. Patient data A key aim of the consortium is to increase the vol- ume of both basic and translational pain research in the state by creating data gathering and sharing programs, and convening diverse teams of researchers to seek grant funding to study them. The idea is that more high-quality datasets about patient pain experi- ences, treatments and outcomes will help drive science forward. Though there are pain datasets available to scientists, Connecticut researchers say there's room for many more, and that sometimes datasets are proprietary and inaccessible to a wider population of scientists. "In my mind, data should be avail- able to anybody in the world, but they aren't," Laubenbacher said. Angela Starkweather, a UConn nursing professor and associate dean who studies pain, wants pain research to catch up to what's been done for other conditions. For example, researchers have done a good job gathering data showing parts of the country, and world, where higher concentrations of people are suffering from cardiovascular disease and heart attacks. But such "epide- miological" data, which aims to find causes and risk factors in a given population, have not been collected to the same extent for pain. "If you could measure the amount of people in pain in the same way and how it impacts them, we could know the conditions they live in, how we could improve them," Starkweather said. "Those are the kinds of ques- tions we can't ask right now because we have nothing. We're way far off in terms of having any access or ability to make any assumptions." She acknowledges that a competitive environment for research dollars does sometimes curtail collaboration among scientists at different universities or Impactful Niche CT scientists want pain research to finally get its due, and funding "If you could measure the amount of people in pain … and how it impacts them, we could know the conditions they live in, how we could improve them." Angela Starkweather , UConn nursing professor and associate dean Reinhard Laubenbacher, a cell and computational biologist with joint academic appointments at UConn Health and Jackson Laboratory, is spearheading a new research consortium that will focus on advancing scientific understanding and treatment of pain. HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER

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