Aditi Bhattacharya
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
People with oral cancer often live with severe pain, and the pain gets worse when the cancer spreads. Opioids are the usual treatment, but they work poorly for this pain, patients become tolerant to them, and they carry a risk of addiction.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
oral cancer
cancer pain
nociception
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure FN1 and its disease-specific variant Fn EDA in oral cancer tissue from patients, using multiplex immunohistochemistry (staining several proteins at once), and test whether their levels track with clinical pain scores and metastasis.
- Test whether Fn EDA acts as a pain mediator by raising or blocking its levels in mouse models of oral cancer pain and measuring the animals' pain-related behavior.
- Determine how Fn EDA sensitizes TRPV1, a pain-sensing ion channel on trigeminal nerve cells, using electrophysiology and calcium signaling measurements.
More about the research
Doctors need pain relievers that work a different way. One promising route is to find the molecules the tumor releases that switch on nearby pain-sensing nerves, and then block those molecules.
Why it matters
Oral cancer patients who are in severe pain currently depend mostly on opioids, which work poorly for them and carry a risk of tolerance and addiction. If Fn EDA proves to be a driver of this pain, blocking it could become the basis for non-opioid pain treatments for oral cancer. The same approach might also extend to pain management in other cancers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yatendra Mulpuri
New York University, NY·Neuroscience·Early-career
Develop and validate tests that measure pressure and stretch sensitivity in oral cancer patients, capturing aspects of cancer pain not measured before.
Brian Schmidt
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether co-delivering OPRM1 DNA, the mu-opioid receptor gene, with knockdown of F2RL1, the gene for protease-activated receptor-2, eliminates cancer-induced pain behavior in mice, using non-viral peptide-lipid and lipopolymer carriers.
Kevin Tidgewell
University of Kentucky, KY·Pharmacology
Isolate bioactive compounds from Cameroonian medicinal plants such as Paullinia pinnata by fractionating extracts and testing each fraction for binding to sigma-2/TMEM97, a calcium-regulating protein linked to pain.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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