Description:

Theodore Price, PhD
Eugene McDermott Professor
Director, Systems Neuroscience Program, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies
University of Texas (UT) at Dallas

The dorsal root ganglion houses the nociceptors that are the first neurons of the pain pathway.  Extensive preclinical work in rodents suggests that these neurons are key drivers of neuropathic and other pain states. We know relatively little about the molecular profile of these neurons in humans or how they might change in people who have neuropathic pain.  The talk will focus on our recent efforts to profile these neurons using RNA sequencing and other methods.  How these neurons change their phenotype in people with neuropathic pain will be a major theme.  Another will be how these neurons differ between rodents and humans and what this might mean for therapeutic development.

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.