PI: Ru-Rong Ji, PhD; Department of Anesthesiology
Mentors: Aidan McGinnis, Yul Huh
Pain is good when it is short term but is a problem and serves no real purpose once it becomes long term or chronic. A form of chronic pain is neuropathy, or nerve damage, which has no cure nor effective treatment. To develop novel treatments for neuropathy, previous experiments involving a cytokine of interest showed strong pain relief in male mice but not in females. This is a big issue in medicine because studies have been done predominantly in male animals as scientists were not fully aware of sex differences within how the sensory system operates. Previously, experimental data showed that said cytokine’s receptor 1 is more expressed in male sensory neurons—also known as dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons—than in female DRG neurons. Currently, immunohistochemistry (IHC) has been used to identify and quantify the cytokine’s receptor 2 in male and female DRG and have showed no sexual dimorphism in expression level. The next step is to identify and quantify the cytokine’s receptor 3 in male and female DRG and potentially in spinal cords as well to identify the means by which the cytokine of interest alleviates neuropathic pain in males but not in females to then potentially create effective nerve pain treatments for both sexes in humans.
