Human‑Centered Approaches to Neuropathic Pain: From Mechanisms to Translation

Since 2014, Dr. Serra has been a Consultant in Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology at King’s College Hospital, London. Jordi Serra received his medical degree in 1988 from the University of Barcelona and completed his Neurology specialty in 1992 in Barcelona. He spent following years (1992 – 1995) as a Neuromuscular Fellow at the Neuromuscular Unit, Good Samaritan Hospital and Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, Oregon, USA, where he specialized in the study, diagnosis and treatment of neuropathic pain patients.

During this period, he was trained in the technique of microneurography. Microneurography offers an unrivaled tool to study spontaneous pain in humans by producing objective records of the abnormal nerve impulse activity responsible for paresthesia (myelinated fibers) and spontaneous pain (unmyelinated fibers). This is the only available technique to detect and quantify positive sensory phenomena of peripheral nerve origin in humans by recording individual action potentials from single sensory fibers.

Dr. Serra’s pioneering work on the recording of abnormal spontaneous activity in C-nociceptors from patients and animal models of neuropathic pain is widely cited in medical literature. Currently, he is researching the correlation of peripheral nociceptor spontaneous activity as seen in patients with the perceptual experience of ongoing pain.

Dr. Serra’s expertise also lies in the areas of electromyography, nerve conduction studies, evoked potentials, quantitative sensory testing, thermography, and intraoperative electrophysiological monitoring.

He cofounded both the Pain section of the American Academy of Neurology and the Neuropathic Pain Group of the Spanish Society of Neurology, where he served as the first Chairman. He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the British Society of Clinical Neurophysiology, the Spanish Society of Neurology, and the Spanish Pain Society.

Dr. Serra has authored many scientific journal articles and book chapters. He is a frequently invited speaker and organizes courses on neuropathic pain. He also serves as a reviewer for several scientific journals.

Manuela Schmidt completed her PhD at the International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences in Göttingen (Germany) in 2006. She subsequently joined the laboratory of Prof. Ardem Patapoutian at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where she investigated TRP and Piezo2 ion channels. She went on to establish an Emmy Noether-funded research group at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, focusing on the systems biology of pain. In 2020, she was appointed Full Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Vienna, where she also serves as Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Life Sciences.

Theodore (Ted) Price is Ashbel Smith Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is the Director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies. Ted did his PhD with Ken Hargreaves at UT Health San Antonio and his postdoc with Fernando Cervero at McGill. Ted started his independent lab in 2007 at the University of Arizona and moved to UT Dallas in 2014. Ted’s lab’s goal is to identify molecular mechanisms causing chronic pain with emphasis on developing new drugs to treat pain. His lab’s focus is on human molecular neuroscience with specialization in the dorsal root ganglion and spinal dorsal horn. Ted has published more than 250 peer-reviewed studies and has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 15 years. He is a co-founder of many companies, including 4E Therapeutics.

Angelika Lampert, MD, is the Director of the Institute of Neurophysiology at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She coordinates the Sodium Channel Network Aachen and serves as speaker of the Scientific Center for Neuropathic Pain Aachen (SCNAACHEN), focusing on inherited neuropathic pain syndromes such as small fiber neuropathy linked to sodium channel mutations. Her research emphasizes translational basic science, including patient-derived stem cells, Patch-Seq, sodium channel biophysics, and pharmacology. Angelika is co-chair of the IASP Global Year 2026 on Neuropathic Pain. 

Daniela Maria Menichella, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Pharmacology at Northwestern University in Chicago. She directs the Peripheral Neuropathy Multidisciplinary Clinic and the Charcot-Marie-Tooth Association Center for Excellence. Dr. Menichella provides care for patients suffering from neuropathic pain due to peripheral neuropathy. In addition to her clinical work, she is actively involved in basic and translational research and takes part in NIH NeuroNext and NIH HEAL EPICC clinical trials. Her research focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie neuropathic pain and axonal degeneration in both hereditary and acquired peripheral neuropathies, with a particular emphasis on painful diabetic neuropathy. Her laboratory utilizes an integrated approach that combines pain behavioral testing, electrophysiology, in vitro and in vivo calcium imaging, confocal microscopy, chemogenetics, and single-cell RNA sequencing, using conditional and transgenic mouse models. Recently, her lab has begun to validate therapeutic targets using human tissue, such as dorsal root ganglia (DRG) and skin biopsies from patients with well-characterized painful peripheral neuropathies. 

Diana Tavares Ferreira, PharmD, MS, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas. She earned her PharmD and MS degrees from the University of Coimbra and completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, followed by postdoctoral training at UT Dallas. 

Her research focuses on axonal transport, RNA regulation, and plasticity in neurodegeneration, peripheral neuropathies, and chronic pain. She employs a broad range of omics, experimental, and computational approaches to investigate mechanisms underlying nervous system dysfunction. 

Patrick Dougherty, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Pain Medicine–Research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. 

Throughout his career, his research has focused on understanding the neurochemical and physiological consequences of peripheral nerve injury and inflammation on central nervous system activity. His laboratory’s recent work centers on elucidating the mechanisms of pain in cancer patients, with the goal of identifying interventions for chemotherapy‑induced neuropathic pain and cancer‑related hyperalgesia. This work includes complementary clinical and preclinical studies, combining quantitative sensory testing with skin biopsy to define the specific sensory nerve fibers involved in chronic chemoneuropathy.

His research was among the first to demonstrate that cancer itself can contribute to neuropathy prior to treatment and that pre‑existing differences in distal innervation influence pain vulnerability. More recent studies have characterized anatomic, physiological, and transcriptomic changes in human dorsal root ganglia associated with neuropathic pain, revealing sexually dimorphic molecular mechanisms underlying ectopic neuronal activity and persistent pain.