This talk will educate the audience on the basic principles of the human somatosensory system with an emphasis on pain pathways and mechanisms. Attendees will learn the mechanisms of primary versus secondary hyperalgesia and some interesting psychophysical and clinical phenomena that occur due to this. The structure of normal cutaneous innervation will be discussed, as well as some processes that appear generalizable to many chronic pain conditions. Finally, some new basic physiological discoveries made on human primary sensory neurons will be reviewed.

Biography: The research of Prof. Patrick M. Dougherty’s group is centered on determining the mechanisms of neuropathic pain experienced by cancer patients and is composed of parallel studies conducted in both humans and animals. In the human studies, they have conducted psychophysical studies to define the sensory fibers involved in these pain conditions; and more recently, they expanded this work to utilize human dorsal root ganglia tissue excised during surgical treatment for cancer or provided by organ donors. The animal studies have been done to define both the peripheral and central neurophysiological mechanisms that are altered following cancer and cancer chemotherapy and to determine agents that may provide a neuroprotective role. The current emphasis in each of these studies is to determine the role that innate immune mechanisms and even more recently the role that membrane lipid rafts play in the pathogenesis of cancer- and cancer treatment-evoked neuropathic pain. Overall, the lab of Prof. Dougherty has been continuously funded for the past 29 years. He has published 208 manuscripts and 31 book chapters and received greater than 12000 citations with an H-index of 67. These numbers over the past 5 years include 51 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 1500 citations and an H-index of 19.

IPHYS contact person: Jiří Paleček, Laboratory of Pain Research, jiri.palecek@fgu.cas.cz