Dr Pieter Siebenga successfully defended his PhD thesis ‘Characterization and re-evaluation of experimental pain models in healthy subjects’ at Leiden University!
With an increasing need of new, targeted analgesic compounds with fewer side effects, the importance of human evoked pain models to demonstrate pharmacodynamic effects of analgesic compounds is now higher than ever. Pharmacodynamic evaluation of new analgesic compounds with human evoked pain models offers the possibility to determine the dose ranges at which the analgesics exert their pharmacological effect. Pain models may also aid in the choice of target population, determine for which modality of pain the drug is expected to be most suitable, help to differentiate between a central or more peripheral mode of action, and help determine which other effects contribute to its mode of action e.g., sedation. Using pain models in healthy volunteers has important advantages over assessing the effects of new drugs in patients with pain, as the pain elicited in human pain models is predictable in its intensity while clinical pain will naturally fluctuate. Analgesic properties can therefore be investigated with pain models without the influence of accompanying symptoms that are often seen in patients with pain.
For his thesis, Pieter conducted research on the efficacy of different (novel) analgesics using a battery of human evoked pain models (CHDR’s PainCart), and validated/improved human evoked pain models.
Pieter was supervised by Professor Adam Cohen and his co-promotor Dr. Geert Jan Groeneveld. For more information, please reach out to us.
