A new project led by the University of Oxford aims to change how chronic pain is treated. The EPIONE (Effective Pain Interventions with Neural Engineering) programme will use a systems engineering approach, rather than traditional drug discovery, to target the brain’s pain networks.
Chronic pain affects between one-third and one-half of adults in the UK, which is nearly 28 million people. This condition results in significant direct treatment costs for health services and indirect costs due to lost productivity.
The EPIONE team brings together experts in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and clinical medicine. Patients living with chronic pain will also help design the new interventions. According to Professor Tim Denison from Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, “Each of EPIONE’s members are world-renowned experts in their own field, and the programme is unique in bringing this level of expertise to work together closely on such a highly integrated project. This will allow us to develop ‘smart’ therapies for chronic pain that monitor the body and adjust treatment dynamically -rather than delivering fixed doses. We are including people with the lived experience of chronic pain to co-develop our technologies and research methods, especially how we explore the role of nocebo and placebo effects in novel interventions. Economics also factors into our work, as we want to ensure our technologies are viable for the NHS and beyond.”
Some expected innovations from EPIONE include an adaptive brain implant ready for clinical trials at scale, an implantable closed-loop drug delivery system that adjusts medication automatically, non-invasive stimulation techniques targeting multiple brain regions at once, and a smart therapy system linking brain sensors with feedback technology.
Collaborators on this project include researchers from Cambridge, Glasgow, UCL, NHS clinicians, industry partners like Amber Therapeutics—a University of Oxford spinout—and other companies working on related devices such as Picostim-DyNeuMo deep brain stimulation implants.
Professor Ben Seymour from the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre said: “Neurotechnology has the potential to realise substantial impact on reducing the burden of chronic pain in the UK and worldwide. But to date, this has not been realised – chiefly because this requires combining diverse expertise to engineer integrated therapeutic systems, and translate these into clinical delivery. EPIONE will address this by leveraging Oxford’s strengths in interdisciplinary research to design a new generation of pain technologies.”
The project receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) under reference number UKRI1970.