Date: Wednesday, December 18, 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., Eastern (US) Time
This webinar is being produced through a collaboration of the IASP’s Pain and Placebo Special Interest Group and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA – in particular – the University of Maryland School of Nursing’s Placebo Beyond Opinions Center. Both groups are aligned on advancing unbiased knowledge of placebo effects by promoting interdisciplinary investigation of the placebo phenomenon and nurturing placebo research.
The IASP defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage” to better articulate the biopsychosocial dimensions of this phenomenon. While our understanding of pain has greatly evolved over the past decades, there are still fundamental questions that need to be addressed, including its psychological components.
Preliminary evidence suggests that psychedelics, such as psilocybin, provide analgesic properties in chronic pain conditions. However, the mechanisms behind this and the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics in pain management remain vastly understudied, with many studies citing difficulty in quantifying results due to unpredictable subjective dose intensity. Join us for this edition of the Placebo Beyond Opinions Center guest lecture hybrid series, “Psychedelics in Pain Management: Exploring Therapeutic Potential, Pharmacology, and Clinical Considerations,” presented by a panel of three distinguished speakers. The webinar will feature:
- Andrew Coop, PhD, University of Maryland School of Nursing, USA
The Pharmacology of Psychedelics: Is There a Mechanism Explaining Microdosing? - Maurizio Fava, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
De-risking Psychedelic Trials in Pain: The Role of Placebo - Patrick H. Finan, PhD, University of Virginia School of Medicine, USA
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for Chronic Pain: Considerations for Optimizing Therapeutic Context - Luana Colloca, MD, PhD, University of Maryland School of Nursing, USA (host)
About the Presenters
Andrew Coop, PhD, has been a faculty member in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences since 1999, serving as chair of the department from 2007 to 2015, and has recently been appointed by Maryland Governor Wes Moore to the Task Force on Responsible Use of Natural Psychedelic Substances. His NIH-funded medicinal chemistry research program in the area of opioids involves the design and synthesis of novel opioids as potential analgesics with reduced undesired effects, specifically analgesic tolerance, and also to investigate the interaction of the opioid system with other biological systems. In the area of antidepressants, his lab is focused on delineating the influence of the cholinergic system in depression in collaboration with Dr. James Woods. Dr. Coop is an expert on psychedelics, having testified in federal criminal trials and to Maryland House and Senate committees, and teaches the science of psychedelics in the MS in Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics.
Maurizio Fava, MD, is a world leader in the field of depression. He founded and was director of the hospital’s Depression Clinical and Research Program (DCRP) from 1990 to 2014. In 2007, he founded and is now executive director of the Mass General Psychiatry Clinical Trials Network and Institute (CTNI), the first academic CRO specialized in planning and coordination of multicenter clinical trials in psychiatry. Under Dr. Fava’s direction, the DCRP became one of the most highly regarded depression programs in the country, a model for academic programs that link, in a bi-directional fashion, clinical and research work. Dr. Fava has most recently been appointed the chair of psychiatry at Mass General Brigham. His prominence in the field is reflected in his role as the co-principal investigator of STAR*D, the largest research study ever conducted in the area of depression, and of the RAPID Network, the NIMH-funded series of studies of novel, rapidly acting antidepressant therapies. He has authored or co-authored more than 800 original articles published in medical journals with international circulation, edited eight books, and published more than 50 chapters and more than 600 abstracts. Dr. Fava is also editor-in-chief of Mass General’s Mind, Mood & Memory newsletter.
Patrick H. Finan, PhD, is the Harold Carron Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He is a clinical pain psychologist and an expert in cognitive, behavioral, and affective mechanisms and treatments for chronic pain. He has an active NIH-funded research program that utilizes laboratory (e.g., experimental sleep disruption, quantitative sensory testing, fMRI), ambulatory (e.g., actigraphy, EEG, ecological momentary assessment), and psychotherapeutic intervention (e.g., meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy) methodologies to probe mechanisms related to chronic pain. Dr. Finan is an associate editor for PAIN and is actively involved in committees for the United States Association for the Study of Pain, the International Association for the Study of Pain, and the Winter Conference on Brain Research.
About the Host
Luana Colloca, MD, PhD, is an MPower Distinguished professor at University of Maryland, School of Nursing, Baltimore, Director of the TL1 program, Chair of the Pain and Placebo Special Interest Group for the International Association for Study of Pain (IASP) Society and the Treasurer for the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of Placebo (SIPS). Colloca holds an MD, a PhD in Neuroscience and a Master’s degree in Bioethics. Prof. Colloca has received several prestigious awards, such as the IASP Patrick D. Wall Award for basic research on pain mechanisms, and leads an NIH-funded research portfolio on endogenous pain modulation including placebo/nocebo effects and other nonpharmacological interventions such as virtual reality. Colloca and her team have been published in top-ranked journals including Nature Neuroscience, JAMA, NEJM, Biological Psychiatry, Pain, and Lancet Neurology, among others. Colloca herself has been invited for interviews with media outlets such as The National Geographic, The New Scientist, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Nature, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, News and World Reports.