About Us

Two hundred years ago, surgery without pain was unimaginable. Yet anesthesia was just around the corner. The effects of ether, the first widely recognized anesthetic, were demonstrated in chickens in the 1500s. Yet, it sat virtually unused for 300 years, while everything from leg amputations to tooth extractions were carried out with much cruder forms of relief. What if there are similarly powerful options currently lying in wait for treating chronic pain, anxiety, and even depression? 
 

Initially limited to large invasive surgeries, anesthesia showed that the goal is not to eliminate sensation but to manage pain precisely—keeping what is necessary while removing what is harmful. Techniques like epidurals and local anesthetics now routinely enable fine-grain control of pain's intensity, location, and duration to meet individual needs. New nonaddictive therapies—including safer pharmaceuticals and gene therapies—could similarly open transformative possibilities for both human and veterinary medicine.

 

There are also already-available options for screening against disorders and clinically excessive distress when making animal breeding decisions. Given that many of the key mechanisms and genes are shared across species, therapeutic interventions have remarkable potential to improve health and wellbeing across species. What is needed is a field to foster not only scientific advancement, but to leverage existing technical options, and to ensure that these options are used in a manner that is both ethical and socially acceptable.

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Strategy
As an initial focus, unite and help build a cross-disciplinary research field to advance understanding of the technical feasibility and social acceptability of therapeutic interventions. 

 

Core Considerations for this New Field

• Ethics and Acceptability: Evaluating the social acceptability of potential therapies and assessing ethical safeguards.

• Technical Feasibility: Assessing the technical and practical applicability of interventions across human and animal contexts, including medicine, agriculture, and companion animal care.

• Legal and Regulatory Alignment: Anticipating trends in legislation and regulation to support responsible innovation in affective health.

Key Benefits of a Comparative Approach

• Cross-Species Insights: Identifying genetic and neurological factors conserved across species helps pinpoint new therapeutic targets.

• Therapeutic Versatility: Research in diverse species and breeds can lead to innovations applicable to human medicine, veterinary practice, and animal breeding. 

• Precision Medicine: Comparative studies highlight species-specific differences that refine and enhance the precision of treatments targeted to specific patients with unique genetic backgrounds.

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Our Goals

1. Help foster innovative drugs and genomic therapies to reduce maladaptive pain and other negative affective states.

2. Promote active inquiry across all academic disciplines, as no one is the expert in this emerging field.

3. Ensure everyone has a voice in shaping ethical and equitable solutions for the future.

4. Create comprehensive genomic maps for wild and domestic species with unique affective traits.

5. Assess how therapeutic methods influence social acceptance of innovations.

 

Our Tactics

• Fostering cross-disciplinary scientific interest groups across institutions

• Organizing scientific symposia to share groundbreaking research

• Assisting collaborators in securing research grants from NIH, USDA, and international organizations

• Publishing reviews that synthesize emerging insights

• Publishing original research

• Partnering with industry to translate research into practical applications, e.g. screening against neurological diseases and disorders in animals.