Running the study is University of Tasmania Associate Professor of Psychology Luke Johnson who explained the project was about improving treatment outcomes for patients with chronic pain in Northern Tasmania and the Launceston General Hospital.

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"Ketamine is a drug that's been established for the past 50 years," he said.

"It's been in medicine for 50 years where it's used for two purposes. The first purpose it's used for is anaesthesia, and it's an effective anaesthetic agent, but it's also used for pain, both acute and chronic pain.

"If people are experiencing various types of pain, ketamine is a quick way to treat them.

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"An acute pain, like a burn or something like that, you could treat quickly to give relief to a patient with ketamine but for chronic pain, it's more of a challenging thing to tackle."

Professor Johnson said while ketamine was under investigation around the world for its mental health applications, the Tasmanian study was unique for its consideration of chronic pain applications.

"What we're doing that's unique here at the LGH is we're combining that study in chronic pain patients," he said.

"About 60 per cent of those chronic pain patients are likely to have a co-morbidity or experience depression or anxiety.

"Therefore, our hypothesis is that ketamine will have that dual beneficial effect on both pain outcomes and on mental health outcomes.

"We think because ketamine has a role in affecting neurotransmitters in the brain, it's likely to have a beneficial role in modifying that plasticity in the brain that can provide relief for chronic pain."

Professor Johnson said the study had received an $80,000 grant from Launceston medical researcher, the Clifford Craig Foundation, which would be used to establish baseline data.

"This grant from the foundation, from Clifford Craig, is really helpful and really instrumental in obtaining critical pilot data, enabling us to expand the studies into larger clinical trials," he said.

"We're framing this initial study as a pilot study where we'll study 30 people.

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"Those people will come in for a one week-long treatment, so in a way that's 30 weeks of treatment, and then we'll be studying each of those people for six months each."

Longer-term, Professor Johnson said the goal was to increase the size of the study and move to clinical trials, but explained this was dependent on the pilot data and further funding.

"Our goal, once we have obtained this initial pilot data from these 30 patients at the Launceston General Hospital, is to increase the study and to get funding for a larger randomised control trial, which involves a much bigger undertaking and involves more patients - there's a lot more cost associated with it," he said.

"A clinical trial typically costs many millions of dollars, so that's what our goal is, to obtain that data and then increase the size of the study."

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