Greg Scherrer, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Cell biology and Physiology and member of the UNC Neuroscience Center, will use the three-year, $300,000 grant to study the neural basis of pain.
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience selected three projects to receive the 2021 Neurobiology of Brain Disorders Awards, each totaling $300,000 for three years of research on the biology of brain diseases.
The Neurobiology of Brain Disorders (NBD) Awards support innovative research by U.S. scientists who are studying neurological and psychiatric diseases. The awards encourage collaboration between basic and clinical neuroscience to translate laboratory discoveries about the brain and nervous system into diagnoses and therapies to improve human health.
Gregory Scherrer, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and Physiology and member of the UNC Neuroscience Center, was named a recipient, and he will conduct a study titled, “Elucidating the neural basis of pain unpleasantness: Circuits and new therapeutics to end the dual epidemic of chronic pain and opioid addiction.”
Pain is how our brain perceives potentially harmful stimuli, but it’s not a single experience. It’s multidimensional, involving transmissions from nerves to the spinal cord and brain, processing of the signal, triggering of reflexive action, and then follow-up neural activity involved in actions to soothe the pain in the near term and complex learning processes to avoid it in the future.
The Neurobiology of Brain Disorders (NBD) Awards support innovative research by U.S. scientists who are studying neurological and psychiatric diseases. The awards encourage collaboration between basic and clinical neuroscience to translate laboratory discoveries about the brain and nervous system into diagnoses and therapies to improve human health.
Pain is also at the core of what Scherrer sees as two interrelated epidemics: the epidemic of chronic pain, affecting some 116 million people in the United States, and the opioid epidemic that results from the misuse of powerful and often addictive pain-relieving drugs. In his research, Scherrer explores exactly how the brain encodes the unpleasantness of pain. Many drugs seek to affect that sense of unpleasantness but often also trigger the reward and breathing circuits, leading to addiction (and by extension overuse) and the respiratory shutdown responsible for opioid-related deaths.
The Scherrer lab will generate a brain-wide map of pain emotional circuits using genetic trapping and fluorescent-marker labeling of neurons activated by pain. Second, activated brain cells will be separated out and their genetic code will be sequenced, looking for common receptors on those cells that may be targets for therapeutics. Finally, the researchers will investigate compounds in chemical libraries designed to interact with any of those identified target receptors; the effects those compounds have on the unpleasantness of pain; and whether these compounds also carry risk of overuse or affect the respiratory system. Ultimately, the intention is to help find better ways to relieve all types of pain and to improve the wellbeing and quality of life of patients who experience it.
“It’s exciting to have the opportunity to support some of the nation’s leading neuroscientists in their trailblazing research,” said Ming Guo, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the awards committee and Professor in Neurology & Pharmacology at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. “This year’s awardees are conducting research into issues that affect huge numbers of people and society as a whole: Parkinson’s Disease, migraines, and the epidemic of chronic pain that underlies the opioid crisis. By understanding the underlying neurobiology of disease propagation and how these brain disorders operate at the network and cellular level, we open the door to new ways to prevent, minimize, and treat them.”
The awards are inspired by the interests of William L. McKnight, who founded The McKnight Foundation in 1953 and wanted to support research on brain disease. His daughter, Virginia McKnight Binger, and the McKnight Foundation board established the McKnight neuroscience program in his honor in 1977.
Multiple awards are given each year. Here are the other three researchers, part of two research teams, to receive awards this year:
- Rui Chang, PhD, assistant professor, Departments of Neuroscience and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Yale University School of Medicine; and Sreeganga Chandra, PhD, associate professor, Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
From gut to brain: Understanding the propagation of Parkinson’s Disease: Dr. Chang and Dr. Chandra aim to uncover how Parkinson’s Disease propagates from the gut to the brain via the vagus nerve and to explore ways to slow or inhibit this spread. - Rainbo Hultman, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Iowa Neuroscience Institute – Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
Brain-wide electrical connectivity in migraine: Toward the development of network-based therapeutics: Dr. Hultman’s research will create a brain-wide map of the electrical activity present in migraines and test the effect of therapeutics on this activity.
Read more about their projects at the McKnight website.
With 87 letters of intent received this year, the awards are highly competitive. A committee of distinguished scientists reviews the letters and invites a select few researchers to submit full proposals. In addition to Dr. Guo, the committee includes Sue Ackerman, PhD, University of California, San Diego; Susanne Ahmari, MD, PhD, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Robert Edwards, MD, University of California, San Francisco; Andre´ Fenton, PhD, New York University; Tom Lloyd, MD, PhD, Johns Hopkins Medical School; and Harry Orr, PhD, University of Minnesota.
Letters of intent for the 2022 awards are due by March 15, 2021.
About the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience is an independent organization funded solely by the McKnight Foundation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and led by a board of prominent neuroscientists from around the country. The McKnight Foundation has supported neuroscience research since 1977. The Foundation established the Endowment Fund in 1986 to carry out one of the intentions of founder William L. McKnight (1887–1978), one of the early leaders of the 3M Company.
The Endowment Fund makes three types of awards each year. In addition to the Neurobiology of Brain Disorders Awards, they are the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards, providing seed money to develop technical inventions to advance brain research; and the McKnight Scholar Awards, supporting neuroscientists in the early stages of their research careers.
UNC contact: Mark Derewicz, 919-923-0959