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Stephen B McMahon, FMedSci, FSB

Stephen McMahon is Sherrington Professor of Physiology at King’s College London, and Director of the London Pain Consortium. He is a neuroscientist who trained with Patrick Wall in the 1980s. He is principally interested in somatosensory systems and actively engaged in work ranging from molecular biology to electrophysiology to human psychophysical studies. He has published more than 250 original research articles, many highly rated (H-index >90) and is co-editor of the Textbook of Pain. His work has been published in leading scientific journals including, Nature, Nature Medicine, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, Neuron and Brain. He is the holder of a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. His major interest is in pain mechanisms. He was the principal investigator (PI) on a major grant from the Wellcome Trust in 2002 to establish the London Pain Consortium (LPC), of which he is the Scientific Director. Further funding from the Wellcome Trust, most recently in the form of a 5 year Strategic Award, in May 2008, on which he was again the PI, supports continuing research activity and a 4-year PhD training programme. Total support for the LPC currently exceeds £13m. He is also the academic lead of an EU consortium, Europain, which is a private-public partnership funded under the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) scheme. This brings together a large group of academic scientists working in Europe with a group of pharmaceutical companies with an interest in analgesic drug development. Europain receives €6m support from the EU and €13.5m from industry and is undertaking precompetitive clinical and preclinical research aimed at improving understanding and treatment of chronic pain.

Both of these collaborations (the London Pain Consortium and Europain) involve a series of interlinked and mutually supportive programmes of experimental research, underpinned and supported by a coordinated training and bioinformatics facility. There are considerable synergies between the programmes. About half of the research activity is focused on the study of pain in preclinical models, with the major aims of: identifying novel pain mediators; elucidating the peripheral and central nervous system changes contributing to pain; improving and refining animal models of pain and the measurement of pain in these models. The other half of the research activity explores pain mechanisms in humans, with the major aims of: establishing and validating mechanism-based pain models in human volunteers; finding objective measures of spontaneous pain; collecting detailed phenotypic data on chronic pain patients; and determining psychosocial, genetic and clinical risk factors for development of chronic pain.