Identification of Biomarkers for Pain Detection/Diagnosis

We propose to identify biomarkers associated with pain and design a biomarker assay that can be used by scientists to study pain in many different diseases/conditions. Two biomarker discovery strategies will be used to identify candidate biomarkers in diseases associated with chronic pain. Diseases include fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. From a literature search, we have identified over 180 candidate biomarkers associated with pain. To verify each molecule using antibodies would be costly. Hence, we propose mass spectrometry based approaches that can identify hundreds of proteins from small sample sets. The first biomarker discovery strategy is the proteomic analysis of protein complexes isolated from plasma. We have been successful at identifying different protein sets from different diseases using this approach and think this is a feasible approach for this study. The second strategy is the proteomic analysis of small proteins isolated from plasma. We expect to find small neuropeptides known to be associated with pain using this approach. The proteomic data will be mined to look for biomarkers and protein modification. A biomarker database will be used to select the best candidates for pain and a high-throughput assay will be designed for biomarker verification/validation.