Newsroom | 2 Boston Children’s Hospital Researchers Elected to the National Academy of Medicine

As Director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Dr. Woolf studies neural plasticity in relation to pain, regeneration, and neurodegenerative disorders.

He has spearheaded discoveries on how synaptic plasticity, altered excitability, structural reorganization of synaptic architecture, injury-induced transcriptional changes, neuro-immune interactions, and activity-dependent loss of inhibitory interneurons all contribute to the pathogenesis and maintenance of pathological pain. He has also pioneered new ways of phenotyping pain using machine learning.

His work has led to the identification of novel targets for analgesics, and, with Bruce Bean at Harvard Medical School, he has discovered both a way of producing a long-lasting local analgesia and cough suppression and also the advantages of a polypharmacological approach for the development of effective analgesics with no abuse liability. With NCATS he has identified a way of converting human-induced pluripotent stem cells into pain-triggering sensory neurons for disease modeling and analgesic screening, and is also using this to identify new treatments for neuropathy.

Additionally, Dr. Woolf has explored how axonal injury activates a survival and regeneration program in sensory and motor neurons, and he has identified the transcription factors that act as master regulators of these. This has led to novel genetic approaches to increase regeneration, and which together with neuroprotective interventions may ameliorate motor neuron diseases like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy.

Dr. Hur’s research seeks to reveal the underlying principles of immunity by investigating two distinct immunological processes — antiviral immune response and T-cell development. Her Howard Hughes Medical Institute lab, within the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, uses a combination of structural biology, biochemistry, and cell biology to study how the immune receptors detect viral infection and initiate protective immune responses. Her work has also revealed multilayered checkpoints that maintain self-tolerance and how their dysregulation leads to immune disorders. In parallel, her team investigates the regulatory mechanisms governing T-cell development to prevent autoimmunity.

Dr. Hur’s discoveries have defined nucleic acid-driven protein polymerization as a unifying mechanism underlying these diverse immunological functions. Her research has implications for enhancing our understanding of and developing treatments for viral infections, autoimmunity, auto-inflammatory diseases, and cancer.