Our Research

New Pain Therapies

Our goal is to develop new ways to treat pain that target the underlying cause and not just to treat the symptoms. For this we need a better basic understanding of what is driving chronic pain including back pain, accidental injury, sciatica, cancer pain, shingles, and arthritis. To this end, we use new genome editing (CRISPR) and genetic techniques to find genes and pathways that are necessary and sufficient to drive pain diseases, and we study these new factors using fruit flies, mice, and human pain neurons grown from stem cells. We have developed stem cell and CRISPR-based pain therapies, and are currently focused on developing new mRNA-based therapeutics to treat pain and accelerate the chances of helping the >Billion people world-wide suffering with untreatable pain diseases.

Directed Evolution

We have recently developed PROTEUS, a mammalian directed evolution platform that allows us to evolve proteins towards new activities within the context of a mammalian cell. We are using this technology to develop new molecular biology tools for a variety or research or therapeutic applications. This approach is particularly useful to generate new synthetic mRNA that we can use to treat pain or other neurological diseases, and we also have an interest in mRNA-based antivirals.

Our goal is to improve human health by defining the underlying principles that control human biology and disease. From a technical perspective, we primarily use pooled CRISPR screening to find new critical pain genes and pathways which we then investigate further using transgenic animals or human stem cells differentiated into human cells, tissues, and organoids. Therapeutically, we are targeting critical pain pathways using synthetic mRNA we design and evolve which we then encapsulate in lipid nanoparticles towards altering disease course for pain and other major diseases.

The specific genes we investigate are continually evolving as we learn more about the human genome, currently we are focused on these major areas:

Venom mechanisms of action

New pooled CRISPR screening systems allow us to rapidly define the genes and pathways essential for a venom to act on human cells. We have developed more functional pooled CRISPR screening systems to investigate how venoms induce painful signals, and we are using these screening systems to try and identify new pain pathways that we can then target therapeutically. We are also systematically evaluating venom toxins to attribute function to uncharacterised venom toxins and peptides.

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