Laboratories and Centers | Overview
The Berde Laboratory research concerns pediatric anesthesiology and the management of acute and chronic pain in children. Clinical research areas include pharmacology of analgesics and local anesthetics, neurophysiology of general anesthesia in children, clinical outcomes of treatment of neuropathic pain and cancer pain in children, and functional brain imaging of children with neuropathic pain.
The Biobehavioral Pediatric Pain Laboratory is co-led by Dr. Laura Simons and Dr. Christine Sieberg within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Their research projects focus on biological, neurological, cognitive, affective, and social risk and resiliency factors of the pain experience. Projects include animal model, brain imaging, longitudinal clinical cohort, and treatment interventions studies.
The Brain and Eye Pain Imaging Lab investigates nociceptive processing in the human central nervous system, particularly as it relates to oculofacial pain and related disorders. We combine functional and structural neuroimaging techniques, including functional MRI and corneal microscopy, to address translational topics related to pain in patients and volunteers.
The Center for Analysis and Research in Peri-Procedural Outcomes (CARPPO) was established to improve the perioperative and sedation experiences for youth and families undergoing medical procedures requiring anesthesia or sedation throughout the hospital.
Center for Pain and the Brain (P.A.I.N. Research Group) is co-led by David Borsook, MD, PhD, and Lino Becerra, PhD. Their research focuses on the discovery of novel pain pathways (Systems Biology), mapping the CNS response/s in neuropathic pain and analgesics (Biotherapeutics), developing novel high-throughput methods for evaluating analgesics (Predictive Medicine), and incorporating results from animal research into human applications (Translational Medicine). The vision of their program is to produce methods for objective evaluation of chronic pain and methods for evaluation of therapeutics.
The Commons Laboratory is led by Kathryn Commons, PhD. Her research involves a combination of neuroanatomy and behavioral pharmacology in mouse models to study the brain at the systems level. The overall goal is to understand how serotonin has the ability to influence every behavioral output.
Dusica Bajic, MD, PhD, created a key program using infant animal models to determine how morphine acts in the developing brain. For her work in this area, she has received funding from the prestigious Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER).
The Kohane Laboratory is led by Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD. His research focuses on drug delivery, biomaterials in general and nanomedicine in particular. This has included polymeric and other micro-particles and nanoparticles, liposomes, hydrogels, targeted particles, macroscopic devices, and combinations of the above.
The PK Laboratory was created to provide clinicians and researchers with a core competence in Quantitative Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacometrics (QCPP). “Pharmacometrics is the science which deals with quantitative description of disease, drug effects and variability" (ref. American College of Clinical Pharmacology).
The Yuki Laboratory studies the pathophysiology of sepsis and tumor recurrence/metastasis.