Phillip Popovich
Ohio State University, OH·Neuroscience
Most spinal cord injury research aims to repair the cord and restore walking — yet walking is a low priority for most people living with spinal cord injury (SCI), and survival rates for these patients have not improved relative to able-bodied people over the past thirty years. The reason, this work argues, is that SCI is not just an injury to the cord: it sets off slow, progressive damage in organs throughout the body.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Microbiology & Immunology
Physiology
- Topics
spinal cord injury
dysautonomia
neuro-immune interactions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Test the overall hypothesis that dysautonomia after spinal cord injury — lost sympathetic tone plus aberrant spinal autonomic reflexes — breaks neuro-immune homeostasis and produces a chronic state of "neurogenic meta-inflammation."
- Determine how injury-induced changes in autonomic control of immune organs such as the spleen contribute to immune dysfunction and to complications including spontaneous lung and skin infections and impaired wound healing.
- Examine how aberrant autonomic signaling to metabolic organs — liver, adrenal gland, muscle, adipose tissue and gut — drives impaired immunometabolism and conditions such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes after spinal cord injury.
- Combine systems- and network-level analyses with cell- and molecule-level tools to test whether mitigating post-injury dysautonomia restores immune and metabolic balance and improves functional recovery.
More about the research
The guiding idea here is to treat SCI as a whole-body disease driven by a broken conversation between the nervous system and the immune system.
Why it matters
People with spinal cord injury face infections, impaired wound healing, fatty liver disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis, depression and fatigue — complications that are rarely treated as part of standard care and that help explain why survival has not improved in decades. Identifying how disrupted autonomic control of immune and metabolic organs drives these conditions could open treatments that target the whole body, not only the injured cord, improving function and quality of life.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ren Zhang
Wayne State University, MI·Biochemistry
Determine whether MNADK, the mitochondrial NAD kinase, preserves liver energy balance and insulin sensitivity and reduces risk of NASH and type 2 diabetes, using genetically engineered mouse models.
Qi Lin Cao
Florida International University, FL·Neuroscience
Determine how perivascular fibroblasts, support cells surrounding blood vessels, become activated and upregulate PI16 after cervical spinal cord injury, focusing on interferon-gamma signaling and fibrotic scar formation.
Shuxia Wang
University of Kentucky, KY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how the macrophage protein SMPDL3B regulates the receptor CD36 and the inflammatory signaling triggered when TSP1, a signaling protein, binds CD36.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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