The North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine is advancing its leadership in recognizing and treating pain in animals by expanding its Comparative Pain Research and Education Center (CPREC) to include a clinical pain consultation service and by formalizing pain education as part of its veterinary student curriculum.
Dr. Duncan Lascelles, an internationally renowned expert in translational research in pain, leads CPREC and has taught student electives on pain and pain management since 2017. He is working with Dr. Katie Sheats, associate dean and director of Professional Education and Admissions, to integrate those lessons throughout North Carolina State’s veterinary curriculum.
“We will aggressively pursue training of the next generation of pain researchers and pain clinicians,” says Lascelles, who has been at North Carolina State 2 decades. “And our new pain management service will include consult calls for veterinarians and external referrals from veterinarians with clients who need more specialized pain care.”
Lascelles says that Dr. Kathryn Meurs, the Randall B. Terry Jr. Dean of the North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine, was instrumental in expanding the center’s mission.
“NC State is the global leader in comparative and clinical pain research in companion animals, and we’ve produced more information and had more impact in pain identification and management than anywhere else in the world,” Meurs says. “The next steps were to formalize educating our students, to provide materials for owners and for veterinarians, and to put our research into practice by offering a pain management service.”
CPREC’s faculty work across the full arc of translational research, from validating owner-reported outcome measures to advancing objective, technology-driven assessment tools.
Pain and pain management touch nearly every aspect of veterinary clinical care, Lascelles says, and it’s often a side effect of other treatments, such as surgery or cancer care. Offering a pain-focused hospital service and a more formalized curriculum will help elevate pain management as a critical part of individualized client care and trainee-centered learning.
“Pain doesn’t have a home or it doesn’t have a college,” Lascelles says. “The anesthesia and analgesia college is great at acute pain management, perioperative pain management, but anything beyond that, like persistent pain, doesn’t have a home, and it probably never will have a home. Our pain management service will be a funnel that will catch those patients.”
The CPREC already has an impressive history of hosting educational events around pain management, including the sixth international Veterinary Pain Short Course held this month in Raleigh and the Pain in Animals Workshop offered every 2 years in partnership with the NIH to bring in experts from academia, the government, and industry.
Dr. Duncan Lascelles, director of CPREC, and the North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine also are working to elevate pain management in the college’s veterinary student curriculum.
Citation: American Journal of Veterinary Research 87, 8; 10.2460/ajvr.26.06.0253
That partnership with the NIH extends to research funding as well. Researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine currently hold more than $12 million in active pain-research grants from the NIH, animal health foundations, and veterinary industry partners. “Receiving NIH funding shows our faculty’s strength in leveraging how comparative animal models can help solve critical gaps in human health research,” Lascelles says. That same comparative work now grounds the center’s new consultation service, putting the research directly into patient care.
Lascelles intends for the center’s newly restructured website (https://cvm.ncsu.edu/comparative-pain-research-and-education-center/) to provide educational information, research news, funding opportunities, and notices of events for clinicians, researchers, and pet owners alike.
“Together, these initiatives will ensure that advances made in the lab don’t stay in the lab,” Lascelles says. “They will reach the exam room, the research bench, and the living room—improving the lives of animals experiencing pain and equipping the professionals and owners who care for them with better tools to recognize and relieve it.”
