Comparative Pain Research Meetings 2025

Pain shapes survival, behavior, and welfare across species, yet many key questions about how pain starts, persists, and responds to treatment remain open—especially in non-human animals. Comparative pain research helps close these gaps by connecting mechanisms, measurement, and management across taxa and by using naturally occurring disease in veterinary patients to strengthen translation to human pain. Scientific meetings are a major engine for this progress: they bring together clinicians, basic scientists, engineers, industry partners, and—crucially—animal owners and other stakeholders to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and share tools that can be adopted widely. Comparative Pain Research Meetings 2025 will capture and extend the most important advances, debates, and practical lessons emerging from 2025 meetings in this space, with the goal of improving pain outcomes for animals and informing human pain medicine.

Goals
This second volume aims to curate high-value outputs from comparative and translational pain meetings held in 2025, turning “what we learned this year” into durable resources the field can cite, teach from, and build on. We seek manuscripts that synthesize meeting content into clear take-home messages, identify unresolved controversies, and propose tractable next steps.

Priority areas include: (1) improved measurement of spontaneous pain and function in veterinary patients (including digital endpoints and home monitoring); (2) validation and refinement of induced and naturally occurring models that better mirror clinical pain states; (3) cross-species insights into cellular and molecular drivers of persistent pain, including neuroimmune and neuro-glial mechanisms; (4) comparative pharmacology and pharmacokinetics that support rational dosing and safer analgesia; and (5) evaluation of interventions—drugs, biologics, devices, diets, supplements, and physical modalities—tested with clinically meaningful outcomes. We especially encourage contributions that make translation explicit (animal-to-human and human-to-animal), and that incorporate “patients with lived experience” perspectives (people living with pain and owners/caregivers of painful animals).

Scope and Information for Authors
We invite submissions directly linked to the content and outcomes of comparative or translational pain meetings held in 2025, with a required non-human animal component, aligned with the Veterinary and Comparative Pain section in Frontiers in Pain Research. Appropriate article types include Meeting Reports/Proceedings (including extended abstracts or structured summaries), Mini-Reviews, Reviews, Perspectives, Opinions, and Original Research that arose from or were catalyzed by the meetings (e.g., consensus statements, multi-lab methods papers, pilot datasets).

Key themes include:

- Comparative mechanisms of acute and chronic pain across species
- Naturally occurring painful disease as translational models (client-owned animals)
- Pain measurement and outcome tools (behavioral, sensory, imaging, digital biomarkers)
- Comparative pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, and dosing strategies
- Clinical trials in veterinary patients and comparative trial design
- Non-drug and multimodal interventions, including rehabilitation and devices
- Stakeholder engagement and “lived experience” contributions

Conflict of interest statement:
Topic Editor Professor Duncan Lascelles serves on the organizing committee of the Pain in Animals Workshop (PAW). The organizing committee had no role in the editorial handling or peer review of manuscripts in this Research Topic. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the subject of this Research Topic.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: Veterinary Pain, comparative pain, translational models, naturally occurring disease, pain assessment, digital endpoints, clinical trials, analgesic pharmacokinetics, biomarkers, animal welfare

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.