Category: News

Combining the powers of the living and the inanimate, an interdisciplinary team from The University of Texas at Dallas has embedded genetically modified yeast into a synthetic gel to create a novel, shape-changing material designed to grow under specific biochemical or physical conditions.

“This is definitely a case where the product is more than the sum of its parts,” said Taylor Ware MS’11, PhD’13, assistant professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and corresponding author of a paper published in January in Science Advances, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s open-access journal.

The idea to use the reproductive growth of cells to drive shape change within an inanimate container began with an old, reliable standby: baker’s yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

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Tuberculosis is distinguished primarily by the persistent cough that serves to spread the disease. Stopping whatever triggers that cough could greatly reduce the transmission of the disease, which annually kills more than 1.3 million people worldwide.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for Advanced Pain Studies worked with colleagues from UT Southwestern Medical Center to pinpoint a molecule that the tuberculosis bacterium manufactures to induce coughing.

Their findings, published online March 5 in the journal Cell, could help reduce the impact of tuberculosis, which remains one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

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Research going back more than 30 years has confirmed that calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) plays a major role in migraine. However, this work has revealed little about the locations of the protein’s migraine activity in the body.

That was until researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, who carried out a preclinical investigation in rats and mice, pinpointed where certain pain-related CGRP activity takes place in the body. They also found that this particular activity occurs only in females.

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A new preclinical study from University of Texas at Dallas researchers may help explain why migraine is three times more common in women than men.

In research published online April 8 in the Journal of Neuroscience, a protein implicated in the development of migraine symptoms caused pain responses in female rodents, but not in males, when introduced into the meninges, the protective tissue layers surrounding the brain.

Most previous preclinical investigations of migraine and the protein, called calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), used only male animals, leaving the question of neurobiological sex differences unanswered, said Dr. Greg Dussor, the corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of neuroscience in the UT Dallas School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

“This is the first study to show that CGRP might act differently between sexes,” said Dussor, Fellow, Eugene McDermott Professor. “It also shows that CGRP can have a pain-related effect in the meninges, which is something that has been questioned in the literature previously.”

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From Nature:

After decades of assuming that pain processing is equivalent in all sexes, scientists are finding that different biological pathways can produce an ‘ouch!’.

It’s much harder to investigate these pain pathways in people, but clues are emerging. Neuropharmacologist Ted Price, at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his collaborators have found preliminary evidence, published this month⁶, of differences in how immune cells contribute to pain in people.

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From Wired:

“There’s a huge amount of suffering that’s happening that we could solve,” says Ted Price, professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas, Dallas, and an author of the Brain article. “As a field, it would be awesome to start having some success stories.”

Price and his colleagues emphasize that the finding needs further study. But it suggests that a new type of migraine drug that targets a neuropeptide known as CGRP might be broadly effective for chronic pain in women, he says. Women greatly outnumber men among migraine sufferers, and women made up about 85 percent of the participants in the Phase 3 clinical trials of the three anti-CGRP drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2018. Price wonders if the anti-CGRP drugs aren’t specific to migraines—but to women. His work with mice suggests that the drugs don’t work in males, but block pain in females. “CGRP is a key player in lots of forms of chronic pain in women, not just migraine,” he says.

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UT Dallas neuroscientists, Dr. Ted Price and Dr. Greg Dussor, discuss the role of neuroscience in solving the opioid epidemic. See the full article “Can Neuroscience Stop the Opioid Epidemic?”

Every morning as many as a third of Americans wake up to a familiar stabbing back pain, a throbbing headache or some other intrusive incarnation of chronic pain. Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of Americans have sought relief by taking opioids.

Yet opioids have a dangerous dark side: addiction, abuse, overdose. University of Texas at Dallas neuroscientists Ted Price and Greg Dussor believe they can find a better way of treating pain by studying how pain actually works.

Pain research at UT Dallas was highlighted in the Spring 2018 edition of UT Dallas magazine. See the full article “Fresh Approaches”.

Three University of Texas at Dallas scientists—Drs. Ted Price BS’97, Greg Dussor, and Zach Campbell—are attacking this ever-present problem from varied angles, each with his own focus, background, and motivation for understanding it, as well as reducing and pre-empting it.