Medical School
Twin Cities
The main area of focus for the Banik Lab is on the management of acute postoperative pain - an essential component of perioperative care.
Opioids are a mainstay for perioperative pain management. However, they have significant side effects including constipation, respiratory depression, tolerance, addiction, difficulty in weaning, and even death, and their pain control is inadequate in nearly half of patients. Therefore, there is a critical need for better understanding of the cellular, physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying postoperative pain in order to facilitate the development of new and more efficacious therapies.
Over the last 15 years, this lab has studied postoperative pain following surgical incision, including the study of behavioral phenotypes, peripheral nociceptor sensitization, and pharmacologic modulation. At this time, they are interested in the application of genomic technologies to understand the molecular markers for incisional pain. In particular, they are studying transcriptomic changes using state-of-the-art next-generation sequencing and finding out how these molecular networks evolve to develop incisional pain in order to develop new therapies or inform use of the current therapies to treat incisional pain.