Description:

"Neural circuits and therapeutics for pain unpleasantness and its cognitive modulation"

Pain is a multidimensional experience with sensory, emotional, and cognitive components. My lab aims to elucidate the genetic, molecular, cellular, synaptic, and neural circuit mechanisms by which our nervous system generates these different dimensions of pain experience. We also seek to resolve the mechanisms of action of endogenous and exogenous opioids, to understand how opioid drugs alter activity in neural circuits to produce analgesia, along with their deleterious side effects such as tolerance, addiction, and respiratory depression. To these aims, we develop and utilize innovative techniques to resolve the functional organization of pain circuits and that of our endogenous opioid system in vivo, at the single-cell level. The ultimate goal of our research program is to use this novel knowledge to develop novel non-addictive analgesics and treatments for opioid use disorders to end the opioid epidemic

Grégory Scherrer, PharmD, PhD
Associate Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Depts of Cell Biology and Physiology, of Pharmacology
UNC Neuroscience Center