Yuqing Cao
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience
Chronic migraine is highly disabling, poorly understood and hard to treat. Inflammatory immune cells are known to play a part in migraine.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Microbiology & Immunology
Pharmacology
- Topics
migraine
headache
pain
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Determine which T cell types drive or resolve chronic migraine-like pain in mice by depleting CD4+ or CD8+ T cells and profiling T cell subtypes in the trigeminal ganglia with flow cytometry after repeated nitroglycerin.
- Test whether low-dose interleukin-2 raises the anti-inflammatory signals TGF-beta1 and IL-10 in regulatory T cells of the trigeminal ganglia and dura, the brain's outer covering.
- Determine whether regulatory T cells are the main source of TGF-beta1 and IL-10 that let low-dose interleukin-2 reverse chronic migraine, using Treg-specific gene knockouts and adoptive transfer of Tregs.
- Test whether chronic headache depends on the pain peptides CGRP and PACAP, by measuring their levels in trigeminal neurons and using conditional knockout mice lacking their signaling in sensory neurons.
More about the research
Much less is known about T cells, especially regulatory T cells (Tregs), immune cells that calm inflammation. Some migraine patients have fewer Tregs, or Tregs that work poorly, in their blood. This raises the question of whether an imbalance between immune activation and suppression helps migraine become chronic.
Why it matters
People with chronic migraine have limited treatment options. Understanding how regulatory T cells and the signals they release calm overactive head pain neurons could point to new therapies, such as boosting the body's own regulatory T cells with low-dose interleukin-2. Clarifying the roles of CGRP and PACAP could support drug discovery based on how migraine becomes chronic.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Booki Min
Northwestern University, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how Lag3, an inhibitory surface co-receptor, lets Foxp3+ regulatory T cells suppress autoimmune neuroinflammation, using mice with the Lag3 outer domain, cytoplasmic tail or KIEELE motif deleted only in Tregs.
Zhenyu Zhong
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Define how obesity-associated loss of nerve–immune communication in the liver contributes to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), using complementary mouse models and human liver specimens.
Jamie Spangler
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Discover and design multispecific down-regulating antibodies (MSDR Abs) that bind several sites on one immune checkpoint protein, clustering it and removing it from the T-cell surface.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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