Derek Howard's paper on sleeping pain neurons published in Cell!

Massive congrats to Derek Howard on his co-first author paper published in Cell! Derek co-led this work with Jannis Körner from Angelika Lampert’s group at Uniklinik RWTH Aachen in Germany. Together, we cracked the molecular identity of “sleeping nociceptors” — pain-sensing neurons that normally stay quiet but go haywire in chronic pain. Derek’s bioinformatics work identified key molecular and electrophysiological markers, which our collaborators then validated directly in human skin. The result is basically a Rosetta stone for translating between the electrical and genetic languages of pain neurons.

Check out the CAMH press release here.

Naturally, we had to celebrate properly — so we took Derek out for barbeque at Golden Horseshoe in Toronto. Why BBQ? Well, the paper’s main model organism was pigs. Over the years this project has probably generated more pig puns than actual scientific insights (pork-seq, oink-seq, the list goes on). We regret nothing.