Nearly one in five Europeans (19%) suffers from chronic pain, which represents a significant burden to the whole society and to European economies, and has major consequences for the ability of patients to lead productive working, social and family lives. Although there are several compounds currently used to treat neuropathic pain, they have a limited efficacy and present side effects that can restrict their use. Nowadays treatment of severe chronic pain remains unresolved and there is an urgent need for more effective drugs and biomarkers of inter-individual variability as well as new animal models with high predictive value to evaluate the analgesic and side effects of novel compounds. The NeuroPain consortium profits from the expertise of several complementary European research groups leading behavioural, electrophysiological, genetic and clinical studies in order to generate new neuropathic pain models of high predictive value for the preclinical evaluation of novel treatments and the identification of biomarkers of inter-individual variation and treatment effectiveness in human patients.