University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Linda Watkins has received a national award in recognition of her nearly 30 years of research into how the immune system enhances pain and the clinical implications of that for controlling chronic pain.
Watkins, a professor and researcher in CU-Boulder's psychology department and Center for Neuroscience, received the Norman Cousins Memorial Research Award from the PsychoNeuroImmunology Research Society. The award recognizes outstanding contributions in basic or clinical research in psychoneuroimmunology, which is the study of how the brain and the immune system interact.
In April, Watkins was honored with the American Pain Society's 2005 F.W.L. Kerr Memorial Award in recognition of her achievement and contributions to the field of pain research over the span of her career.
"I am very honored to receive this award as the research is truly a melding of a number of fields of research," Watkins said. "Receiving the Norman Cousins Award recognizes the power of immunology for finally bringing chronic pain under control."
Watkins and her collaborators have developed a novel gene therapy to control chronic pain that currently is being evaluated to determine if a clinical trial for humans is feasible in the near future. If successfully developed, the treatment could bring relief to millions of people who suffer from chronic pain.
Over the past 30 years, Watkins has focused her research on pain with the aim of discovering how to effectively control chronic pain. During the past 15 years she has worked to try to understand if and how the immune system "talks" to the brain.
She found that when a person gets sick, the immune system takes command, changing how the brain works. This immune-driven change in brain function creates what is called the "sickness response," which includes fever, increased sleep, increased pain and many other changes familiar to anyone who has suffered from the flu.
During the course of these studies, she became a pioneer in the study of how immune cells in the body and immune-like glial cells in the spinal cord amplify pain. This work has led Watkins to believe that these glial cells, which together with neurons make up the central nervous system, amplify pain and that they hold the key to the puzzle of controlling chronic pain.
The gene therapy Watkins and her team are working on involves giving patients the DNA for interleukin-10, or IL-10, through a nonsurgical injection near the spinal cord every few months. The injection will selectively make the spinal cord overproduce IL-10, a protein that specifically targets glial cells and turns them off. When that happens, the chronic pain goes away, according to Watkins.
In December 2003, CU signed a licensing agreement with the biotech company Avigen Inc. of Alameda, Calif., allowing Watkins' research team and Avigen to work jointly to develop a novel gene therapy to control chronic pain. Watkins and her collaborators at CU-Boulder and Avigen recently were awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue their research.
The PsychoNeuroImmunology Research Society is an international organization of scientists focused on understanding how the brain and immune system dynamically regulate each other's functions. Watkins will receive a $1,000 award for giving the Norman Cousins Memorial Lecture during the society's next national meeting to be held in early June 2006 in Florida.