Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks

ACTTION’s Director, Robert Dworkin, PhD, will receive the 2015 Mitchell B. Max Award for Neuropathic Pain from the American Academy of Neurology in recognition of his outstanding achievements in neuropathic pain during AAN’s annual meeting (April 18-25, Washington, DC). Dr. Dworkin’s research has focused on the treatment and prevention of chronic neuropathic pain, especially herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia, and on identifying modifiable characteristics of analgesic clinical trials that can improve their assay sensitivity. Dr. Mitchell Max was a renowned neurologist and pain researcher who made groundbreaking contributions to pain treatment and the design of analgesic clinical trials, including demonstrating that the analgesic effects of tricyclic antidepressants were independent of their antidepressant effects, proposing the first roadmap for the development of mechanism-based pain treatments and conducting clinical trials designed with that objective, and developing research methods to address the critical role of variability in analgesic treatment response. He was a very active and valued participant in IMMPACT meetings, and were it not for his untimely death, we are confident he would have played an important role in ACTTION.