Our research

Persistent pain is a widespread issue impacting the lives of 20% of Canadians. With the aging population, these numbers are expected to increase over the next two decades. Most individuals living with chronic pain have unmet medical needs, which highlights the urgent need to better understand the underlying causes of chronic pain in order to develop better therapeutic strategies.

As our society ages and advances in medical science enable individuals to endure severe illnesses, it is projected that this proportion will escalate to 33%. Moreover, chronic pain extends its reach to the younger demographic, as 6–8% of Canadian children grapple with persistent and intense pain. The continued and escalating prevalence of chronic pain underscores a significant deficiency in our comprehension of the fundamental neurobiology of pain, emphasizing the urgent need for enhanced understanding and targeted solutions.

Our group is focused on understanding the neurobiology of pain, with an interest in the ion channels responsible for the detection of painful stimuli, the neuronal networks involved in processing these stimuli, and the brain centres involved in their interpretation.

Our research themes include:

1.    Identification of novel membrane proteins expressed in peripheral sensory neurons and involved in the transduction or transmission of pain signals.

2.    Understanding how sensory signals such as touch and pain are processed by the complex network of interneurons in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord.

3.    Shedding light into the underlying causes of sensory impairments in neurodevelopmental disorders.

4.    Finally, we have always been interested in the mechanisms that permit biological system to detect mechanical cues from their environment. We have examined these in mammals, but also in plants through collaborations with outstanding plant biologists.

Techniques

Our constant need to understand these exciting biological questions have pushed us, over the years, to acquire a series of expertise that we routinely use in the laboratory. These allow us to have an integrative approach and range from biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, calcium imaging, electrophysiology, and behavioral analysis through the use of deep neural networks such as DeepLabCut. We often go beyond the boundaries of our current expertise by partnering with outstanding colleagues, whether in proteomics, neurophotonics, or computational neuroscience.