Chronic pain is a persistent pain lasting longer than three months, and it affects one in five adults in Europe. Chronic pain negatively impacts a person’s quality of life due to physical limitations, emotional distress, and reduced ability to perform daily activities. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the FRESCO4NoPain project aims to address the lack of non-pharmacological treatments for chronic pain. The working hypothesis is that chronic pain is caused by maladaptive brain oscillatory activity, proposing neuromodulation as a treatment strategy. The project will train doctoral candidates in interdisciplinary and research skills to advance scientific understanding of brain mechanisms in chronic pain.

QSPainRelief (H2020 RIA) aims to develop effective drug combination treatments for the improved relief of chronic pain. A quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) mathematical modelling approach will be used to identify and validate more effective therapeutic interventions by smart combinations of existing drugs. The ultimate goal is to personalise and maximize pain relief for individuals suffering from chronic pain while diminishing side effects.

The MULTITOUCH ITN aims at providing high level training to a new generation of Early Stage Researchers (ESR) in the multidisciplinary field of haptics. MULTITOUCH will explore how tactile feedback can be integrated with auditory and visual feedback in next-generation multisensory human-computer interfaces (HCI) combining tactile, auditory and visual feedback, such as multisensory tactile displays (TD) and multisensory virtual reality (VR) setups, with the aim of producing an enriched user experience. During the project, the ESRs will improve current knowledge on how touch integrates with the other senses in conditions of active touch, i.e. when tactile input is generated by active contact with the environment (e.g. tactile exploration of the surface of a display, tactile exploration of VR environments).

The IMI2 Paincare Consortium is composed of 40 participants from 14 countries; 6 are EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations) participants with strong traditions in pain research and development, 23 are internationally renowned academic and clinical institutions, 5 are specialist SMEs with cutting-edge technologies, 3 are patient organizations and 3 are professional pain/anesthesia societies.

The Consortium addresses three important topics: (1) patient reported outcome measures to improve management of acute and chronic pain (PROMPT); (2) Pharmacological validation of functional pain biomarkers in healthy subjects and animals (BioPain); (3) Improving translation in chronic pelvic pain (TRiPP).