Alberta Cancer Foundation

New Chairholder in Palliative Care Brings Wealth of Knowledge

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Dr. Anna Taylor has spent her entire career researching pain and how to manage it

By Karin Olafson

Photograph courtesy of Dr. Anna Taylor.

In January 2024, Dr. Anna Taylor was appointed as the Alberta Cancer Foundation Chair in Palliative Care. Her extensive experience and research background makes her uniquely well-suited for the position.

Taylor has been researching pain since 2004, when she was still an undergraduate life sciences student at Queen’s University.

“I think that pain is one of the most distinctive conscious experiences that we have as a species, and understanding how our brain processes that information is just a really interesting angle in which to explore consciousness,” says Taylor, an associate professor in the department of pharmacology at the University of Alberta.

“This position provides a unique opportunity for me to build momentum at the institution well beyond the walls of my own lab. That is such a powerful opportunity, and I’m deeply grateful to the donors.”

Dr. Anna Taylor

Taylor has spent her entire career researching pain, the challenges of treating chronic pain and the improvements that could be made in managing chronic pain clinically. After completing her PhD at McGill University and doing a postdoctoral fellowship
at the University of California, Los Angeles, Taylor accepted a faculty position at the University of Alberta in 2017. Here, Taylor found herself interacting with clinicians working in palliative care and discovered the types of problems they encountered in their palliative-care clinic were exactly the types of questions she was trying to answer in her lab.

“Pain is the number one symptom that affects people at end of life,” says Taylor. “I study how our brain processes the experience of pain and how pain impacts our sensory, emotional and cognitive experiences.” One area of her research examines how opioids are used to manage chronic pain at end of life; opioids are commonly given during palliative care to manage pain and provide comfort. But, the longer someone is given opioids, the less effective they are. When taken over time, they actually generate pain (this is called hyperalgesia), and, with cancer patients and patients
with other life-limiting diseases living longer than before due to advanced treatment options, this method of pain management is less effective.

“In palliative care, there is a moral obligation to provide pain relief. My lab is trying to develop strategies where we can maintain the positive effects of the opioids, while trying to avoid the negative side effects like opioid-induced hyperalgesia. We’re also asking, can we develop even better, non-opioid, pain-relieving drugs?”

Colleagues encouraged Taylor to apply to the Alberta Cancer Foundation Chair in Palliative Care position in 2023. While the five- year term includes an endowment to support Taylor’s research, her role will mostly involve deciding how to distribute that endowment to others to increase the momentum of palliative-care research, encourage networking between palliative care researchers and develop a training program.

Taylor is also inspired by the previous Chair, Dr. Vickie Baracos:

“What I found really inspiring about her is that, in her tenure as Chair, she was really effective at networking and collaborating with clinicians and clinical researchers to perform transformative and translational research. This is something that I strive to do as Chair too, to avoid silos in the research world.”

This position — and the work it results in — is only possible because of Alberta Cancer Foundation donors.

“This position provides a unique opportunity for me to build momentum at the institution well beyond the walls of my own lab. That is such a powerful opportunity, and I’m deeply grateful to the donors.”

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