Crossing a chasm: Patient partnership and preclinical pain research

Despite the increasing recognition of the value that patient involvement in clinical research adds, patient partners or lived experience consultants remain underutilized in preclinical pain research. This commentary, co-authored with a lived experience consultant, highlights the mutual benefits of integrating patient partners into discovery-based research, including enhanced innovation, improved trust, increased transparency, empowered advocacy, and more effective knowledge translation. Lived experience consultants offer unique insights into symptom burden, treatment outcomes, and model relevance, contributing to more meaningful and translatable research. However, barriers persist, including limited access to patient networks, power imbalances, lack of training for researchers, and insufficient funding for lived experience consultant engagement. Addressing these challenges requires structural support, education, and mandates from funding and regulatory bodies. By fostering collaborative, bi-directional partnerships, preclinical researchers can ensure their work aligns more closely with patient needs and priorities, ultimately improving outcomes and accelerating impact. This commentary proposes actionable strategies for building effective, ethical, and sustainable researcher-patient collaborations for not only chronic pain research, but all discovery-based science. PERSPECTIVE: Involving patient partners in preclinical pain research improves health outcomes by aligning studies with real patient needs. Their insights enhance study design, relevance, and impact, leading to more meaningful outcomes. This collaboration improves quality of life, trust in science, and results in more effective translation of discoveries into real-world solutions.