The goal of this project is to create the scientific foundation that will empower pain researchers around the world to approach the problem of treating pain in a new way, deeply rooted in a fundamental understanding of the first neurons and first synapses in the pain pathway.
At the University of Washington, we will focus on patients with chronic low back pain. In collaboration with the University of Texas at Dallas and MD Anderson Cancer Center, we will thoroughly phenotype patients and apply RNA sequencing techniques with cellular resolution. We aim to fundamentally advance our understanding of the molecular neuroscience underlying human chronic low back pain, and enable the discovery of therapeutic targets based on human molecular pathology.