Identifying mechanisms and novel treatments of bone pain - closing the gap to the clinic. BonePainIII

Musculoskeletal conditions are the most common cause of severe long term pain in the EU and lead to significant healthcare and social support costs. The prevalence increases with ageing, and as the lifespan of individuals is increasing and skeletal health is decreasing due to lifestyle factors such as obesity and lack of physical activity, the burden of bone pain on individuals and society is expected to further increase in the coming decades.

Bone pain is notoriously difficult to treat with the available analgesics and there is a huge need for mechanism-based treatments. Therefore, it is pertinent to train highly skilled researchers to promote frontline research, innovation and education within bone pain. In BonePainIII we bring together 3 industrial beneficiaries, 4 academic beneficiaries, two industrial partners and three academic partners in a highly interdisciplinary and intersectoral network encompassing bioengineering, neuroscience, pharmacology, drug discovery and clinical medicine.

BonePainIII will train a new generation of 10 creative, entrepreneurial and innovative early stages researchers (ESR), who in a doctoral programme will achieve research specific and transferable competences. The transferable skills program consists of workshops and courses covering essentials skills for a successful career in academic or non-academic sectors and includes entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, open science, coding and artificial intelligence, communication, self-marketing, outreach, intellectual property rights, and environmental practices.

A strong participation of the non-academic sector committed to hosting ESRs and to train through secondments and workshops ensures that the ESRs will be exposed to both academia and industry, and a gender balanced supervisor group will counteract gender-related barriers.

Two major obstacles hamper drug discovery in bone pain: 1) the lack of understanding of the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms of bone pain, and 2) a translational gap to the clinic. In BonePainIII, we will address these challenges through four integrated and ambitious, yet achievable research work packages.