David D Mckemy
University of Southern California, CA·Neuroscience
Cold is a strange sense. A mild cool feels pleasant and can even soothe pain and itch, yet intense cold hurts, and after injury or disease even mild cold can become painful, a condition called cold allodynia.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
Pharmacology
- Topics
cold allodynia
cold pain
menthol receptor
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2031
What they work on
- Define the cellular mechanism by which artemin and its receptor GFRα3 make TRPM8 cold-sensing neurons more sensitive after injury, producing cold allodynia.
- Use a mouse genetic strategy that separately targets GFRα3-positive and GFRα3-negative TRPM8 neurons to test each group's role in acute cold sensing, cold pain, pain- and itch-relieving cooling, and migraine-like pain.
- Identify spinal cord neurons tuned to TRPM8 input with an adapted genetic approach, and study them molecularly, functionally and behaviorally to learn how pleasant and painful cold are processed.
- Test whether activating TRPM8 in the skin of the head can relieve localized skin hypersensitivity associated with migraine in mice.
More about the research
In mammals, both sensations depend on a single protein: TRPM8, the menthol receptor, an ion channel in sensory nerve endings that opens in response to cold. How one channel produces such opposite experiences, and how injury makes it oversensitive, is the central question. The lab's two linked grants, an ongoing project and its renewal, address it from the skin to the spinal cord.
Why it matters
Cold hypersensitivity is a painful feature of nerve injury and chronic disease, and the work extends to migraine headaches. By defining how artemin and GFRα3 sensitize TRPM8 cold-sensing neurons, the research could reveal targets for treating cold pain. It could also inform therapies that use cooling itself to relieve chronic pain, itch or migraine-related sensitivity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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