Gilbert J. Grant, MD

Pain after surgery and trauma is often inadequately treated, resulting in unecessary suffering and possibly leading to significant medical complications. A simple, effective, and reliable means of providing analgesia would be greatly beneficial. To this end, our laboratory has focused on using liposomes, currently used as a biocompatable means of drug delivery for various pharmaceuticals, as slow-release, drug-delivery vehicles. By acting as a slow-release vehicle for analgesics, liposomes potentially can provide prolonged analgesia in patients suffering from pain with a single drug administration. Our laboratory is involved in developing liposomal delivery systems for local anesthetics and narcotics. To date, we have demonstrated that liposomal encapsulation produces a five to ten times prolongation of analgesia when compared to free drug in animal models. We plan to assess the safety of these formulations so that they can then undergo efficacy testing in humans. We view these promising results as offering hope that liposomal narcotic and local anesthetic formulations may be used clinically to significantly decrease pain and suffering in patients.