Project leader
| Prof. Dr. Ye Yu |
|
State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines and Schools of Basic Medicine and Clinical pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University Key Laboratory of Preclinical Study for New Drugs of Gansu Province, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University E-mail: yuye@cpu.edu.cn |
Pain constitutes a multifaceted biopsychological construct. Acute pain functions as an evolutionarily conserved protective mechanism, rapidly detecting noxious stimuli—such as mechanical trauma, pathogen invasion, or tissue damage—and eliciting behavioral adaptations that limit further injury. When pain endures beyond its adaptive threshold, typically defined as persistence for over one month, recurrence or continuous presence for more than three months, or intensities overwhelming intrinsic compensatory mechanisms, it evolves into chronic pathological pain. This state imposes significant strain across multiple physiological systems and, in severe cases, may threaten survival.
Growing bodies of research underscore pronounced sex-dependent divergences in nociceptive processing, pain affect, and the epidemiology of pain disorders. Women exhibit higher prevalence rates for conditions such as migraine—estimated at threefold that of men—and often describe pain that is more severe, recurrent, temporally extended, and cyclic. Underlying these disparities are complex interactions involving sex steroid hormones, neurotransmitter networks, endogenous opioid systems, and sex-specific neuroanatomical and functional architectures; psychosocial determinants, including gender-norm expectations and social support, further modulate pain experience.
Although current analgesics offer measurable relief in acute pain states, their therapeutic impact on chronic pain is insufficient. Moreover, widely adopted analgesic agents display sexually divergent efficacies and adverse-effect profiles. Nonetheless, most mechanistic studies, target-discovery pipelines, and drug-development frameworks fail to systematically incorporate sex as a critical biological variable, with male animal models frequently used by default. To address these gaps, our research group will leverage established analgesic target candidates to dissect how sex-specific endocrine, inflammatory, and cytokine trajectories during development and maturation modulate pain-related protein networks. Our ultimate objective is to engineer sex-specific analgesic interventions that minimize adverse effects and realize the goals of precision pain management.
