Brian Schmidt
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Oral cancer hurts more than any other cancer, and the pain is mechanical: it flares with the ordinary movements of talking and eating, so patients lose the ability to speak and feed themselves comfortably. Opioids bring side effects and stop working as tolerance builds, leaving no satisfactory treatment.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
oral cancer pain
head and neck squamous cell carcinoma
non-viral gene therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- 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.
- Compare delivering the genes before tumor formation, by transfecting oral cancer cells used to build xenografts, with injecting them directly into tumors in a chemical-carcinogen mouse model of oral cancer.
- Use RNA interference and CRISPR/Cas9 to silence F2RL1 within the tumor and determine which approach better reduces signaling by sensory neurons that innervate the cancer.
- Measure pain in oral cancer patients and quantify OPRM1 and F2RL1 expression in their tumors versus matched normal tissue, testing whether dysregulation of these genes correlates with reported pain severity.
More about the research
Rather than dosing the whole body, this project aims to change the tumor itself, delivering genes into the cancer so that the nerve endings growing through it stop sending pain signals.
Why it matters
Severe, treatment-resistant mouth pain is one of the hardest parts of oral cancer, and current options rely on opioids that carry side effects and lose effect over time. A gene therapy delivered into the tumor could become a non-opioid way to relieve this pain and let patients eat and speak, and the patient tissue analysis may indicate who would be most likely to respond.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aditi Bhattacharya
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
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.
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.
Theresa Guo
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Predict and rank splice-variant-derived peptides, short protein fragments made only by tumors with abnormal RNA splicing, from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma using an established computational pipeline.
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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