Investigators: Rox Anderson, MD Institution: Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Anderson is a Professor in dermatology at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine; and adjunct Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. Dr. Anderson has developed many of the non-scarring laser treatments, widely used in medical care. He has also contributed to treatment for vocal cords, kidney stones, glaucoma, heart disease, photodynamic therapy for cancer and acne. He has co-authored over 250 scientific publications and has 65 issued patents. He is a co-founder of many medical device companies including Seventh Sense Biosystems and Follica, Inc. and serves on the advisory panel of many other.
Opioid addiction is a major, growing crisis in the United States and the developed world. As many as 36 million people worldwide are estimated to abuse opioids, with over 2 million Americans suffering from prescription opioid addiction. Prescribed for both acute and chronic conditions, opioid pain blockers provide temporary relief at the cost of habit formation [1]. Unfortunately, for many conditions including surgical recovery, opioids are amongst the few options available. It is clear that a replacement for opioids is urgently needed that can provide rapid and lasting relief from pain.
Over the past several years, the Anderson group at Massachusetts General Hospital has developed a method that may offer temporary local pain control without the use of drugs through direct modification of nerve conduction. In this paradigm, the myelin sheath that surrounds nerves and enables long-distance conduction of action potentials is temporarily disrupted through a cooling process, leading to a loss of sensation that returns within weeks due to the body's own repair mechanisms. This approach was discovered during the development of cold therapy body sculpting technology, where study participants noted a loss of sensation following the procedure. In a collaboration between the Anderson and Evans laboratories, this loss of sensation was determined to arise due to myelin sheath loss only at the site of cold treatment [2].
The LBRC offers coherent Raman imaging tools via the Evans laboratory at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine that will provide the Anderson team with the imaging tools needed to study myelin disruption and repair. The laboratory also offers a multimodal automated coherent Raman microscope with confocal, multiphoton, and FLIM capabilities. Furthermore, the LBRC provides experience in tissue imaging and quantification, specifically in the areas of neuroscience. Image analysis toolkits developed by the members of the LBRC will be used to analyze coherent Raman imaging data and extract quantitative information including parameters such as myelin concentration, myelin structure, and axon size.