Editor’s note: This is the 14th in a series of weekly PRF seminars designed to help keep the pain research community connected during the COVID-19 pandemic and to provide all members of our community with virtual educational opportunities. The seminar series is supported by the Center for Advanced Pain Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, US.
On August 10, 2020, the IASP Pain Research Forum hosted a seminar with Angelika Lampert, MD, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. A Q&A session moderated by Ted Price, PhD, University of Texas at Dallas, US, followed the presentation.
- Angelika Lampert, MD, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
- Ted Price, PhD, University of Texas at Dallas, US
A recording of this seminar will soon be freely available to IASP members at the IASP Pain Education Resource Center (PERC).
Here is an abstract from Dr. Lampert
Chronic neuropathic pain treatment is still a therapeutic challenge, and mechanistically based individual treatment is scarce. Genetically encoded pain syndromes offer the chance to study mechanisms of chronic pain at a cellular level. Our lab uses induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from pain patients carrying mutations or genetic variations, and we differentiate those cells into nociceptors. In my talk I will present an in-depth phenotyping of a pain patient accomplished by using iPSC-derived neurons, electrophysiology, and microneurography. This may help us to understand the individual pain phenotype of this patient and the underlying pathophysiology, which may advance the development of better, patient-specific treatments in the future.
About the presenter
Angelika Lampert, MD, is a full professor in the Institute of Physiology (Neurophysiology) at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She is the coordinator of the Sodium Channel Network Aachen (SCNAachen) focusing on inherited neuropathic pain syndromes such as small-fiber neuropathy linked to sodium channel mutations. Her research concentrates on the translation of laboratory findings to potential clinical treatment, either as a population therapy or personalized medicine. The Lampert lab has two main focuses: 1) biophysics and structure-function relation of voltage-gated sodium channels and their mutations linked to pain, and 2) induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and their differentiation into peripheral sensory neurons as a model for human neuropathies in the dish. Dr. Lampert studied human medicine in Jena, Germany, and Strasbourg, France, and completed her MD thesis at the Max Planck working group Molecular and Cellular Biophysics in Jena in 2003. Following postdoctoral training with Dr. Stephen G. Waxman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Dr. Lampert set up her lab in Erlangen, Germany, before moving to Aachen in 2013. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the German Society for the Study of Pain (DGSS).
About the moderator
Theodore (Ted) Price, PhD, is the Eugene McDermott Professor and director of the Systems Neuroscience Program in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at University of Texas (UT) at Dallas. He is also the director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies at UT Dallas. He did his PhD work with Chris Flores and Ken Hargreaves at UT Health San Antonio, and a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University with Fernando Cervero. He started his independent laboratory in 2007 at University of Arizona School of Medicine and moved to UT Dallas in 2014. His lab is interested in molecular mechanisms driving the transition to chronic pain with a focus on drug development for chronic pain disease modification, and on peripheral and central mechanisms of neuronal plasticity in response to injury. He has won numerous awards including the John C. Liebeskind Early Career Scholar Award from the American Pain Society and the Patrick D. Wall Young Investigator Award from the International Association for the Study of Pain. Ted serves on editorial boards for leading pain and neuroscience journals such as PAIN and Journal of Neuroscience, and is a standing member of the Somatosensory and Pain Study Section for NIH.
Join the conversation about the seminar on Twitter @PainResForum #PRFSeminar
We thank the Center for Advanced Pain Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, US, for its support of the PRF seminar series.
