About Center for Neuroplasticity and Pain (CNAP)

Center for Neuroplasticity and Pain (CNAP) is a Center of Excellence at the Department of Health Science and Technology, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation in the period 2015-2025.

Our vision

The ambition of CNAP is to identify and modulate key features of human pain neuroplasticity. We keenly believe that this can be achieved through a systematic engineering approach, including provoking, probing and modulation of the dynamic neuroplastic properties of the pain system.

Our approach

CNAP applies a basic research approach where new advanced biomedical provocation and probing platforms are being discovered and applied to study novel aspects of the human pain neuroplasticity. When an injury results in acute pain, the nervous system undergoes an adaptive neuroplastic response resulting in an increase in sensitivity. After some time, the pain neuroplasticity is normalized as the injury heals. In some cases, such neuroplastic processes fail to normalize during convalescence, and acute pain develops into chronic pain with hypersensitivity. The continuing pain after injury resolution may be caused by maladaptive pain neuroplasticity. In contrast, advantageous neuroplasticity permits the nervous system to cope with challenges such as maladaptive pain neuroplasticity to help returning to a pain-free state.

Interdisciplinary, international cooperation, and research training combined with the capacity of leading researchers is the core research philosophy of CNAP. Thus, all our research groups are highly interdisciplinary and include experts within e.g. biomedical engineering, neuropsychology, pharmacology, biophysics, and medicine. To secure international excellence, CNAP strives for an equal distribution between genders and between national and international staff.

Research groups

CNAP consists of researchers from four different research groups:

• Neural Engineering and Neurophysiology
• Integrative Neuroscience
• Pain and Motor System Plasticity
• Translational Pain Biomarkers