September 7, 2021

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) is announcing its upcoming participation in the 2021 Pain in Animals Workshop to be held on October 14-15, 2021. The virtual workshop is hosted by the National Institutes of Health to promote animal welfare and management of pain in animals and people. 

This free, virtual workshop is intended to help accelerate the discovery and approval of safe and effective non-opioid pain therapies and other analgesics for both people and animals. The ability to accurately measure pain in animals is a critical step in being able to develop these types of therapies for pain management. In addition, effective management of pain ensures patient comfort and can help promote healing.

The workshop will focus on the use of gait analysis (the evaluation of how an animal walks and runs) to evaluate chronic pain in dogs, and acute pain in cattle and rodents. Additionally, the workshop will discuss accelerometry, a device used to measure an individual animal’s activity, in order to measure pain and the benefits of pain management drugs. The potential use of biomarkers in pain assessments will also be discussed. 

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from across the globe who are working to better understand and develop ways to manage pain in animals. FDA CVM staff will present at the conference issues related to the potential use of accelerometry in regulatory studies.

The FDA encourages interested stakeholders to attend the workshop. The symposium is free; however, pre-registration is required. For more information and to register, visit 2021 Pain in Animals Workshop.