Physician Investigator (Cl) Neurology, Mass General Research Institute

Associate Professor of Anaesthesia Harvard Medical School

Associate Professor of Neurology Harvard Medical School

Assistant Anesthetist/Pain Medicine Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

Principal Faculty Harvard Stem Cell Institute

MD Columbia University in the city of New York 2004

als; amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; autonomic nervous system; cervical vertebrae; chronic pain; cyclic amp; injections intra-articular; ion channels; methylprednisolone; motor neurons; muscle proteins; post-traumatic headache; rna transfer; spinal nerves; trigeminal nerve; tyr Brian Wainger's lab fuses electrophysiology and stem cell biology to explore how abnormal neuronal physiology contributes to diseases of the motor and sensory nervous systems. Working with motor neurons derived from ALS patients and healthy controls, Dr. Wainger performed fundamental electrophysiological characterization and identified motor neuron hyperexcitability in ALS patient-derived motor neurons (Wainger et al., 2014). Mechanistic analysis of the motor neurons led to the identification of a novel therapeutic candidate, which will be investigated in a clinical trial.

On the sensory neuron front, Dr. Wainger developed a lineage reprogramming technique for derivation of pain sensing (nociceptor) neurons from human fibroblasts (Wainger et al., 2014). This technology has already revealed novel insights through disease modeling of familial painful neuropathy and promises to be valuable in the development of drug screens using human neurons.