November, 2023

The discovery of robust markers of the recovery vs. persistence of pain and disability is essential to develop more resourceful and patient-specific treatment strategies and to conceive novel approaches that benefit refractory patients. Given that chronic pain is a biopsychosocial process, the discovery, and validation of a prognostic and robust signature for pain recovery vs. persistence requires measurements across multiple dimensions in the same patient cohort in combination with a suitable ‘big data’ computational analysis pipeline for the extraction of reliable and cross-validated results from a multilayered and complex dataset. The SPRINT (Signature of Pain Recovery in Teens) brings together a team of scientists and clinicians from Stanford University (Nima Aghaeepour, Martin Angst, Brice Gaudilliere, Laura Simons), University of Toronto/Hospital for Sick Children, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. With an initial signature derived in the discovery (R61) phase that implicated neuroimaging, immune, quantitative sensory, and psychological markers using machine learning approaches from our large and complex data set, we now launch into the R33/Validation Phase to validate the signature derived in the R61 study. This signature will be useful for a range of adolescent-based clinical trials in which identification of the highest risk individuals is necessary hopefully providing a clinically actionable intervention algorithm.