Meet the faces behind UNE’s new Center for Cell Signaling Research

In 2023, Molliver was the recipient of a five-year, $2 million R01 grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to study the role of mitochondria — the “powerhouses of the cell” — in altering the function of pain-sensing neurons, leading to the formation of chronic pain.

Molliver said UNE is uniquely positioned to study such health issues as one of the most rural states in the country and that the work completed in the Center for Cell Signaling Research will eventually help Mainers live more comfortably.

“There is a tremendous amount of excitement about how we can help people to live healthier and have a high quality of life,” he said. “Those are the dramatic new questions for society that this center will be looking into.”

Cao is an immunologist whose research focuses on chronic pain. Her lab research explores injury-induced neuropathic pain and HIV infection-associated neuropathy with the goal of identifying strategies for improving pain management.

Prior to joining UNE COM in 2007, Cao completed her training in clinical medicine at Beijing Medical University and subsequently completed Ph.D. training at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany). She later finished her post-doctoral training at the University of Rochester Medical Center and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

In 2023, Cao was awarded a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the NIH to research the development of a novel drug to alleviate nerve pain in patients living with HIV. She is also one of two leaders on a joint research project to establish a first-of-its-kind comprehensive registry for Mainers living with chronic pain, which affects about 30% of Maine residents.

She said the CCSR IVAC facility hopes to grow through collaborations with other research centers and core facilities around the state in order to serve the broader scientific community in the near future. 

According to Balog, current therapeutic approaches for wound healing are often inadequate because they do not address the underlying causes of impaired healing. Regenerative medicine strategies — including stem cells, growth factors, and scaffolds — offer solutions to that by promoting the body’s own natural healing processes and improving tissue regeneration.

Specifically, Balog will focus on the role of poorly understood growth factor receptors in the formation of healthy blood vessels, which are necessary to promote wound healing. The goal of the research is to identify the signals involved with the intention of developing elastin-like polymers that can be used in biomaterials to promote proper wound healing.

Such biomaterials, she said, can help reduce a patient’s risk of infection and improve their quality of life.

“This is a really hopeful project in terms of the promise of regenerative medicine and our ability to understand how cells communicate and what they need so that we can direct cell behavior, growth, and differentiation in the context of healing,” Balog remarked. “This new center serves as an engine of growth that is well timed given our extension into the biotechnology sphere. It is all happening at a very good inflection point.”

About 10 million people in the United States are living with osteoporosis, and 43 million in total experience some form of low bone density. Both conditions increase the risk of fractures that carry a 25% mortality risk for patients over 50.

According to Becker, most current medications for osteoporosis primarily focus on reducing the breakdown of bone density, but research into therapeutics that can rebuild bone is relatively limited. Her work in the COBRE will focus on the role of a protein called Dock7 in the formation and reabsorption of bone tissues and the implications this pathway may have in developing new treatments and preventions for osteoporosis and bone density loss.

“Targeting bone formation is a really underutilized mechanism of treating osteoporosis,” Becker explained. “We are trying to have a better understanding of these processes to develop new treatment options to help patients live a better quality of life.”

Becker said her research represents the work of a growing community of bone researchers in Maine dedicated to developing better treatments for the state’s aging population.

“Getting the word out to try to understand what a dire problem this is will help bring new researchers into the realm and deal with this silent problem,” she said. “This new COBRE is focused on problems of aging, and UNE is really primed to be a part of this niche research community.”

There is no known cure for the disease, though Filippakis and his team hope to identify potential drug candidates for treatment by studying the metabolic and cellular pathways that feed TSC-deficient (disease-causing) cells.

Through their research, the group has observed that TSC-deficient cells survive and proliferate through a process known as macropinocytosis, whereby they “drink up” their surrounding nutrient-rich fluid.

The team found that TSC-deficient cells have a particular affinity for the amino acid tryptophan and that blocking the absorption of tryptophan inhibits the growth of disease-causing cells in TSC. Filippakis’ research in the CCSR will focus specifically on methods that block the absorption of tryptophan, effectively starving the cells of their nutrients, in the pursuit of medications that may have the same effect and open doors to a cure.

“This research is intended to make discoveries that directly help patients, and it is great to be able to work so closely with the other research project leaders who bring very diverse expertise than mine,” Filippakis said. “This new COBRE has materialized to make discoveries that will not only benefit us and our research but the entire medical community. This step will really bring UNE to the forefront of scientific research.”

The study hopes to inform new therapeutics that can reduce the activation of the satellite glial cells by external stressors and impede instances of chronic pain. Current treatment options are limited, Queme Cobar said, primarily to addictive opioids and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, like aspirin and ibuprofen, that can cause gastrointestinal issues with extended use.

“The main idea is to develop new drugs to treat chronic pain. What we need to identify are the potential changes in gene expression that satellite glial cells undergo when stress is happening and if they facilitate chronic pain,” he explained. “If we can do this, we can target them pharmacologically and find different options to treat pain that may not rely on the current therapies that we have.”

Queme Cobar will engage medical students in his research, an opportunity he said would have benefitted him in his time as a medical student.

“We are training osteopathic physicians who can address health problems in a holistic manner. If students can get early exposure to biomedical science research and data analysis, that will make them better physicians,” he remarked. “This project and the COBRE award is a huge benefit to UNE and the field of osteopathic medicine.”