Q&A: Exploring Chronic Pain In Vitro with Dr. Bryan Black

Meet Dr. Bryan Black, Principal Investigator of The Pain Research Lab at The University of Massachusetts - Lowell.

Dr. Bryan Black graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2014 with a PhD in Physics and Applied Physics. He subsequently served as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas under Joseph Pancrazio. Dr. Black is now an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts - Lowell where he leads the Pain Research Lab. Their studies focus on optical and electrical neural interfaces and how they can be used to better understand and treat chronic pain conditions.

Dr. Black's most recent work, in collaboration with Dr. Zachary Campbell's lab at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, identified a potential therapeutic target for inflammatory pain. They used high-throughput sequencing to compare gene expression and downstream effects in mature hiPSC sensory neurons cultured in isolation and neural co-cultures generated with hiPSC astrocytes, using undifferentiated hiPSCs and mouse dorsal root ganglia as controls.

1. What made you interested in studying pain?

Dr. Bryan Black (BB): My academic background is in Physics and Applied Physics. I decided, as an undergraduate, that I wanted to apply my education in a way that benefited the maximum number of people. Pain is the most prevalent long-term disability in the world. Once I learned the extensive personal, societal, and financial costs of chronic pain, it was a matter of attaining the necessary training to make a substantial contribution.

2. Why has it been so difficult to find effective medications for chronic pain?

Dr. BB: This is, by no means, an original answer, but it is essentially due to chronic pain’s complexity. There is no one mechanistic pathway; one gene; one cell type that guides its pathological progression. It is unlikely, then, that traditional techniques reliant on the identification of druggable targets will be successful.

3. How have stem cell models helped to advance the field of pain research?

Dr. BB: I would say that they offer more promise than immediate help. There are, undoubtedly, important questions to answer regarding the physiological relevancy of acute and chronic nociception models based on stem cells, but it is the only scalable model that moves us away from animals into human tissues.

4.Your recent publication, Global analyses of mRNA expression in human sensory neurons reveal eIF5A as a conserved target for inflammatory pain, explores hiPSC neurons under different differentiation conditions. What are the key takeaways from this research and what role did microelectrode array recordings play in your experiments?

Dr. BB: First, I need to credit Dr. Zachary Campbell at the University of Wisconsin Madison for his scientific leadership and his research team for making this publication possible. Regarding the application of Axion’s Maestro Pro and multi-well microelectrode arrays, they provided a platform on which we could test eIF5A antagonists’ electrophysiological effects on modeled tissues of decreasing complexity. Working from dissociated rodent dorsal root ganglia, we were able to demonstrate selectivity in cell type (i.e., on nociceptors) and conservation of pathway (across models). This type and throughput of experiment would not have been possible using patch-clamp electrophysiology or single-fiber recordings in animals.

Tweet from Dr. Black's lab displaying video of plate-wide neural activity from their iPSC model.

5. What’s next for the pain research lab at UML?

Dr. BB: This is an exciting year for the Pain Research Lab. We are entering our fourth year of funding through the NIH (NCATS) HEAL Initiative. Soon, we’ll begin blinded screening of FDA-approved compounds as potential analgesics using iPSC nociception tissue mimic on multi-well microelectrode arrays. Electrophysiological ‘hits’ that come out of this screening will be streamlined to animal testing and working their way toward helping patients manage or treat their chronic pain conditions.