John Streicher and Katie Edwards attend 2015 Experimental Biology annual conference

John Streicher, Ph.D.,  assistant professor in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, attended the 2015 Experimental Biology annual conference, held in Boston, Massachusetts. He was accompanied by Katie Edwards, a 2013 UNE Alumnus, and current lab manager for the Streicher Lab. Edwards worked for Streicher as an undergraduate volunteer, and was hired by him after graduation. She has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Dartmouth College, which she will be attending in the fall of 2015.

Edwards presented the results of her Streicher Lab research in a poster presentation titled, “Phosphatidylethanolamine-Binding Protein Regulates Mu Opioid Receptor Induced βarrestin2 Recruitment and Downstream Signaling." The goal of this research is to identify new signaling regulators of the mu opioid receptor, the protein target of analgesics like morphine. 

Once identified, these regulators can be used to inform novel drug discovery approaches to create new analgesic drugs without the side effects and drawbacks of current opioids. This poster presented one such protein and their progress in determining how this protein regulates the mu opioid receptor.