DARPA’s Role in Solving Chronic Pain

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

DARPA Pain SartellThe Defense Advanced Research Program Agency, known as DARPA, has a new project. DARPA is the agency that first fostered the development of the driverless car and a number of robots for both civilian and military purposes. It is the research wing of the military and it works on developing new technologies that may benefit the military as well as everyone else.

The latest project is the Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx) program. It is designed to discover the science and technology that will stimulate the peripheral nervous system to detect and fight disease. The goal is to establish a better understanding of the nervous system and how it functions in health and disease.

The government has not spent significant money on pain in the past. Now DARPA is going to push major funding into the research area of understanding the nervous system, how it is injured, and what causes chronic disease. Then they plan to research how to use science and technology to modulate the nervous system. There are going to be seven research teams working over the course of four years to move the needle to improve our understanding of what goes wrong in injury and disease and to develop new technologies in treatment.

DARPA’s Plan

According to program manager Doug Weber, DARPA hopes to create fundamental changes in how we manage diseases and injuries.

“Through the combination of a growing understanding of how the nervous system regulates many aspects of our health and advancing technology to measure and stimulate nerve signals, I believe we’re poised to make fundamental changes to the way we diagnose and treat disease,” said Weber.

To that end, seven teams of researchers have been selected to research and demonstrate a way to modulate the nerves artificially so a healthy signal flow can be maintained for self-healing.

DARPA hopes to implement therapeutic stimuli when unhealthy activity in the nervous system occurs as an alternative to traditional treatments for chronic pain, inflammatory diseases, and PTSD among many possible conditions. The influx of a significant funding and research into the understanding of the nervous system in health and injury hopefully will lead to new and better treatments of pain. This appears to be a very positive step forward for the field of pain, however it will be several years before we know the results.