Ed Bilsky discusses SWAGƵ pain research on “Maine Calling”
Ed Bilsky, Ph.D., vice-president of research and scholarship, was a VIP call-in guest on the MPBN radio show, “Maine Calling.” The show focused on managing chronic pain.
He joined guests Dr. Stephen Hull, director of the Mercy Pain Clinic, Dr. Amy Belisle of Maine Quality Counts and director of the Chronic Pain Collaborative and Sue Gold, founder of the Southern Chronic Pain Support Group. Both Gold and Hull spoke highly of SWAGƵ’s research and community partnerships.
Bilsky discussed his work researching pain and the drugs used to treat it. He was recently one of several investigators at SWAGƵ and Southern Research to be awarded a $4.5 million NIH grant to study opiate receptors, with the goal of trying to tweak existing pain medications to produce fewer negative side-effects including addiction.
“At the university we are also very much interested in contributing to both the education of future healthcare professionals and also to generate new information that could help answer some of the outstanding questions we have on pain,” Bilsky said on the program. “So our group has a strong background in basic science biology to understand fundamentally how pain is generated, how the experiences of acute pain turns to chronic pain, and then by using that information we hope to apply it with better treatments, not just pharmacological or drug therapy but other modalities as well.”