Professor Wally Smith

Florence Neal Cooper Smith Professor of Sickle Cell Disease School of Medicine Division of General Medicine Virginia Commonwealth University Wally R Smith, MD is the Florence Neal Cooper Smith Professor of Sickle Cell Disease at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has personally cared for patients with SCD for 40 years. He is best known as the Principal Investigator of PiSCES, (R01 HL 64122, Pain in Sickle Cell Epidemiology Study, the first study to show that in adults acute pain and vaso-occlusive crises were rare in comparison to chronic SCD pain, which affects over half of patients. PiSCES was the first study to relate Emergency Department and hospital use, health-related quality of life, alcohol use, depression and anxiety, catastrophizing, somatization, and coping to daily pain measured using diaries. PiSCES has produced 16 publications, most notably the above landmark publication in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2008 (Jan 15, 148(2):94-101). PiSCES led to an NIH Request for Proposals on the Neurobiology of Pain in SCD. PiSCES methods were replicated in Europe (van Tuijn CF, et al. Am J Hematol. 2017). PiSCES led Dr. Smith and colleagues to develop and publish national consensus research definitions of acute SCD pain (Field JJ, et al. J Pain. 2018 Dec 19), and chronic SCD pain (Dampier et al. J Pain. 2017 May;18(5):490-498). PiSCES has demonstrated three phenotypes of daily SCD pain prevalence/severity (Bakshi N, et al. Pain. 2022 Jun 1;163(6). And recently a PiSCES daily diary research definition of high-impact chronic pain has been published. (Jagtiani A, et al, in press). Dr. Smith also collaborated with colleagues to design and implement the NIH-funded IMPROVE trial as part of the SCD Clinical Research Network (1U10HL083732). IMPROVE was a multi-center phase III clinical trial comparing two alternative opioid PCA dosing strategies. Dr Smith was Pl of the VCU Basic and Translational Research Program in SCD (U54HL090516) which also trained several sickle cell scholars. He was a member of the lnteragency Pain Research Coordinating Committee for DHHS, which published the first National Pain Plan. He is VCU site PI for SCD Treatment Demonstration Program Regional Collaborative for the North East Region. He has twice served on the NHLBI SCD Advisory Committee. Since 2012, He has been Pl of likely the first-ever randomized controlled trial of implementation science in SCD, Start Healing in Patients with Hydroxyurea (SHiP HU, R18HL112737). He is an expert on the PhenX Toolkit panel to define a manageable SCD pain battery to appropriately measure the pain experience in patients with SCD. He is a member of the Multidisciplinary Work Group overseeing the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative, in response to the opioid epidemic. He was co-chair of the July 21-22, 2021 NIH Workshop, Approaches to Effective Therapeutic Management of Pain for People With SCD, an NIH-wide (7 ICs and Centers) Workshop whose themes for advancing research on pain in SCD helped lead to this RFA-AT-24-001. Dr. Smith is a Co-Investigator and Steering Committee Member of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute: HSR Project Number: HSRP20181364 NCT Number: NCT03593395 Comparative Effectiveness of Enhanced Peer Navigation versus Structured Education in SCD, whose major outcome is VOE visits. Dr Smith is a Co-investigator and core advisor on UG3/UH3 multi-site SCD RCT of behavioral/ integrative therapy, Peer suppoRt for adolescents and Emerging adults with Sickle cell pain: promoting ENgagement in Cognitive behavioral thErapy (PRESENCE), PI Jonassaint, Charles, 1UG3HL165839-01A1. He holds positions in the Foundation for SCD Research, American Society of Hematology, and the HEAL initiative. He influences cooperation and innovation to improve pain care for all. He mentors early-stage clinical investigators and is a past or present mentor of SCD pain experts Paula Tanabe (Duke), Charles Jonassaint (Pittsburgh), Nitya Bakshi (Yale), Martha Kenney (Duke), and Daniel Sop (VCU).