Pain

Researchers in Gary Lewin’s lab at the Max Delbrück Center have identified an ion channel that contributes to chronic pain, suggesting a new target for pain medication. The study was published in “Brain.”

Neuroscientists Gary Lewin and James Poulet at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine have won highly coveted and competitive ERC Advanced Grants to study pain and the neural mechanisms that underlie temperature perception.

Touch is a fundamental, yet scarcely understood, sense. Now, the team led by Gary Lewin at the Max Delbrück Center has discovered a second ion channel associated with touch perception. Elkin1 could be a target for pain therapy, the team writes in “Science”.

Special receptor cells under the skin enable us to feel pain and touch. But Schwann cells also play a key role in detecting such stimuli, researchers at the Max Delbrück Center report in “Nature Communications.” This discovery opens new avenues for pain therapy.

The UK’s Physiological Society has named Gary Lewin an Honorary Fellow. Two Nobel Prize laureates in Physiology or Medicine also received the distinction. It is the highest honor that the tradition-rich society presents to an individual.

Mixing and mingling on Hydra: For the anniversary of the Lewin Lab, leading somatic sensation experts, colleagues and students of Gary Lewin all came to a Greek island. In this interview, he talks with his former mentee Stefan Lechner about the symposium, dazzling personalities and what makes a good PI.

For his outstanding doctoral thesis on sexual communication in fruit flies, the Max Planck Society awards an Otto Hahn Medal to neuroscientist Mohammed Khallaf Ali. At the MDC, he works in the Lewin lab and is dedicated to the sensation of touch and pain in animals.

Gary Lewin conducts research at MDC on signaling in human bodies. He looks at how the sense of touch and pain function, especially in the naked mole rat. It can survive for a very long time without oxygen, is largely insensitive to pain, and lives remarkably long. In the Resonator podcast, Lewin talks about these animals and his research.

We have known about a skin touch sensor for more than 160 years. MDC scientists now publish in Nature Neuroscience some of the first proof of its involvement in detecting tiny vibrations that help us to distinguish between a rough or a smooth surface.

If mice live in pathogen-free housing conditions, they are not further burdened by immunodeficiency. This has been reported by researchers at the MDC, Freie Universität Berlin and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in PLOS ONE. For the first time, the researchers comprehensively investigated the well-being of these animals.