Anyone who's experienced or knows someone who has experienced chronic pain appreciates how desperately the world needs a major breakthrough in this arena. Pain management has evolved, there are steady improvements, but unfortunately a lot of people are effectively left behind and the choice becomes a series of profoundly mind-altering drugs... or profoundly mind-altering pain. The way that pain can erode your personality and your life is hard to express quickly in words, but it's both invisible and endlessly corrosive.

I certainly hope that this or another path of research leads to a new generation of therapies that don't depend on opioids and are more effective than current alternatives.