On Demand Webinar
Can rodents experience placebo and nocebo effects like we do? And if they can, are the underlying brain mechanisms actually the same as in humans? More importantly, can studying animals truly tell us anything meaningful about how placebo and nocebo shape pain in patients? Placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia are powerful modulators of pain, yet their neurobiological basis remains difficult to study directly in humans. Animal models offer a unique opportunity to probe underlying mechanisms, but a critical question remains: how well do these models translate?
In this webinar, Dr Boorman will present a novel cross-species approach designed to directly compare brain activity between humans and rodents during placebo and nocebo responses. By combining whole-brain activity mapping in rodents with neuroimaging in humans, a framework was developed to examine whether these phenomena share common neural substrates across species. This work aims to bridge a longstanding gap between preclinical and human research, providing new insight into whether animal models can reliably inform our understanding of pain modulation, and ultimately, whether they can help guide future clinical interventions.
Damien Boorman is currently a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellow in the Martin Pain Lab at the University of Toronto. He originally trained in philosophy, completing a BA focused on the philosophy of mind, before transitioning into neuroscience to investigate how subjective experiences arise from brain activity. This path led him to placebo and nocebo effects, which sit at a unique intersection between brain, body, and psychology, where expectations can profoundly alter the experience of pain. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in the Lab of Neural Structure and Function, where he developed novel preclinical models of placebo analgesia in the context of chronic pain. His current research combines whole-brain activity mapping, functional connectivity, and cross-species approaches to identify the neural circuits underlying pain modulation, with the ultimate goal of translating findings from animal models into clinically meaningful insights.
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