HSCI faculty member co-leads Harvard Medical School project

As the opioid epidemic continues to devastate communities across the U.S., there is a critical public health need for new, safer and more effective medicines to treat pain. To address this need, the Safe...

Clifford Woolf wants to reboot drug discovery to find a new way to treat pain: effectively and responsibly.

• Woolf’s goal is to stop the opioid crisis by rejecting the conventional approach to drug discovery and developing painkillers that do not harm people or communities. 
• He is using stem cells to create models of pain, outside the body and in a dish, that can be used to screen for drugs swiftly and on a large scale.
• The new approach requires ‘all hands’: expertise, equipment, and collaboration in stem...

Turning skin cells into pain-sensing neurons

Human noxious stimulus detecting sensory neurons produced by converting skin cells with a set of five genes to this new fate—enabling study of "pain"in a dish. (Credit: Elizabeth Buttermore, PhD)...