NYU Expert Says Cancer Pain Varies by Tumor Type
Source: www.onclive.com Author: Jane de Lartigue, PhD Brian L. Schmidt, DDS, MD, PhD, is a specialist in head and neck cancers whose research focus includes an exploration of the biological and molecular mechanisms of pain related to cancer and associated treatments. He is the director of the New York University (NYU) Oral Cancer Center and of the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, and a professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the NYU School of Dentistry. In June 2016, the National Institutes of Health awarded Schmidt and colleagues a $1.2 million grant to study gene therapy for the treatment of patients with oral cancer pain. Schmidt talked to OncLive about the difficulties of studying cancer pain and developing new drugs. OncLive: How has our understanding of the mechanisms of cancer pain changed in the past decade? Schmidt: The field was developed probably in about 1999. That’s the first publication that I’m aware of that looked at mechanisms in terms of using preclinical models, and by that I mean animal models. Before that time we really had no understanding of basic mechanisms, so there’s been significant advancement over the last 10 years. Could you briefly describe our current understanding of how cancer pain develops? Let me tell you what it’s not, because I think that’s important. For many years, people were writing about it but we weren’t testing the possible mechanisms, and what people were writing turned out probably not to be true. It was initially thought that the pain was [...]