Kate Gurba, MD, PhD was recently awarded a Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER) Research Fellowship grant for her project titled “Preclinical Evaluation of Analgesia Mediated by a Novel Muscarinic M4 Positive Allosteric Modulator”.
The opioid epidemic has created an urgent need for effective, nonopioid analgesics, and previous work suggests analgesic efficacy from the M4 subtype of the muscarinic receptor. Although highly selective, direct agonists of this receptor do not exist, the current study will examine the effects in mice of a highly selective M4 positive allosteric modulator on pain behaviors under normal, inflammatory, and neuropathic conditions. This may result in future clinical development of a non-opioid analgesic.
The Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER), a charitable arm of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), today announced its spring round of grant recipients who will receive a total of $1.4 million. FAER’s board of directors unanimously approved grants to nine physician scientists.
“FAER is dedicated to developing the next generation of physician-scientists in anesthesiology,” said Paloma Toledo, M.D., M.P.H., chair of the FAER board of directors. “It is essential that we as a specialty continue to support the development of new knowledge. Each of these projects will not only help make important scientific contributions but will continue a long tradition of anesthesiologists improving the quality and safety of the care that we deliver to our patients.”
Mentored Research Training Grants help physician anesthesiologists develop the skills, preliminary data for subsequent grant applications, and research publications needed to become independent investigators. These grants are eligible to faculty members who have completed their core anesthesiology residency training within the past 10 years. Each grant recipient receives $175,000 for a duration of two years.