Kanna,

I will attempt to respond to your question. I am sure you have noticed that you have not received any responses from what is normally a very helpful and informative group. Pain is a very complex phenomenon. As such, studying it in the dish is not ideal or very informative unless you are looking at specific mechanistic questions that may be easier modeled in a dish. I would argue that pain is not merely a physical phenomenon but also a psychological one. A stimulus is merely a stimulus without a brain to interpret or respond to it. To be clear, pain is like every other stimulus that the body receives....heat, cold, touch, etc. They are impulses sent to be interpreted by the brain. The experience of pain is unique to the individual, the injury, disease, available treatment, genetics, etc. and it occurs in a psychosocial context and is not a static but dynamic phenomenon. While you may be able to model certain stressors or activators/inhibitors on cells and also look at expression, morphology etc, you cannot capture the dynamic and complex experience that is pain in a culture system outside of the organism as a whole. I will not say there is never use for cell culture in pain studies as you can study many of the cell types involved in pain processing such as neurons, microglia, astrocytes, etc. and how these cells interact with other cells and measure their expression but the utility is somewhat limited due to the lack of how these things interact within the whole system and also how they are interpreted by the brain. There are always other cell types, proteins, mediators, etc at play in the whole system that cannot be accounted for. If you have a specific research question in mind please share and we might be able to give you ways in vitro to test that specific question but always remember that pain is not simple stimulus/response. Good luck and please let us know if we can help!

Renee

nicely summarized, Renee R Donahue This book says more https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK32659/