The cost of chronic pain in the US exceeds $70 billion dollars annually, with direct costs for pain associated with diabetes alone exceeding 10 billion dollars. Unfortunately long term treatments with opiates for chronic pain have high dropout rates; recent studies suggest that pain relief by opiates become masked by development of adverse signals between cells that are responsible for tolerance, dependence, addiction and chronic pain. Dr. Dooley's goal is to determine the signaling between cells induced by opiates; hypothesizing that responses to opiates by neuronal and immune cells differ depending on type and timing of stimulus and that intercommunication is mediated by radical species.

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