Read more about Allen Receives Adele L. Boskey, Ph.D., Award for Mentorship and Research Excellence.

Under the NIH HEAL Initiative PAIN Cohort Program, the UF team will train 10 to 15 fellows from various academic disciplines over the next five years in a broad national effort to strengthen the clinical pain research workforce and develop new non-opioid treatments for pain management.

UF scientists are asking the question: Why do people experience pain differently? The answer may be found in a surprising place: valuable human tissue that would otherwise be thrown away after surgery.

With $10 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, researchers from UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and the College of Dentistry are storing post-surgical human tissue in a repository, collecting data points from the samples, and mapping and analyzing the tissue via artificial intelligence tools. The goal is to explore pain pathways and create custom pain treatments.

“Pain is often viewed as something simple – a lot of pain, a little pain,” said Kyle Allen, Ph.D., a professor in UF’s J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering. “How do I know you experience pain the way I experience pain? We don’t experience it the same way, and we know this through a lot of research.” 

University of Florida professors Carlos M. Rinaldi-Ramos and Kyle D. Allen, from the Department of Chemical Engineering and the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, are investigating the application of nanoparticles as diagnostic and therapeutic agents for joint diseases, such as osteoarthritis. In a recent study published in Science Advances, their research provides new insight into the diffusion of nanoparticles in synovial fluid and their analogues through the application of state-of-the-art instrumentation to measure the translational and rotational motion of these tiny materials in complex biological fluid environments.

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