Greater awareness needed to fund migraine research

DENVER — Improvements are needed in the process to secure funding for migraine research, Rami Burstein, PhD, said at the American Headache Society annual scientific meeting.

Burstein, the John Hedley-Whyte Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, discussed challenges in obtaining grants to fund research for migraine-specific studies and submitting research proposals.

“Do we just go along with a system that, frankly, is in some ways broken?” Burstein asked.

Specifically, when writing grant proposals, experts are required to form a hypothesis when creating an experimental design, which Burstein said is “unrealistic” and creates “initial bias.”

“Within a grant, you can't actually be honest about what you're doing, and the notion that you're doing discovery research, you might not know the hypothesis yet,” he said. “And so, you've got those criteria for review panels, [which] may really be something that needs to be challenged.”

Burstein noted that experts’ time may be better spent working on systemic issues to change the process, rather than training people to fit within the system.

Further, according to Burstein, the difference in the funding process between migraine research and other disorders is that with migraines, there are no experts on review panels.

“That’s really the issue — if you’re going to somebody who doesn’t understand the problem in the first place, then they’re just going to be focused on the [study] design,” he said.