The subjective nature of clinical pain has made it extremely difficult to translate most areas of pain research into bona fide medical therapies. To address this challenge, Nature Medicine, in collaboration with the University of California–San Diego Clinical and Translational Research Institute, is hosting the 5th annual Frontiers of Clinical Investigation Symposium entitled ‘Pain 2010: From bench to bedside’, which kicks off today in La Jolla, California.

Keeping with the theme of the meeting, in this month’s issue of the journal, I report on two approaches to improve the design of clinical trials of pain treatments.

The first story highlights efforts by some researchers to parse study subjects by the variability of their self-reported baseline pain. Doing so, researchers say, should minimize experimental noise and help prevent good drugs from failing simply due to bad trial design.

The second story focuses on pediatric trials of clinical pain and the view of some researchers that withholding sucrose, which has been shown to reduce babies’ crying time and improve other behavioral measures of pain, from control treatments is cruel and unethical. But some scientists say that sucrose is simply mollifying babies and masking pain instead of preventing pain signals from reaching the brain and causing long term emotional damage.