The Institute for Life Science Entrepreneurship (ILSE) held a translational research competition on October 17th for scientists and entrepreneurs from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The inaugural competition took place at the NJ Center for Science, Technology, and Mathematics at Kean university and featured 10 teams of academic scientists from Rutgers, Princeton, Cornell, as well as several local startup companies.
The competition featured an incredible amount of scientific ingenuity from across the tri-state area and was attended by several in the local business community including BioNJ and the New Jersey Economic Development authority (NJEDA).
Barker Lab Honors Students Win Henry Rutgers Awards
Two of our 2023 Honors Thesis students, Sri Guttikonda and Roshni Vemireddy were awarded the Henry Rutgers Award. This award recognizes the top thesis students at Rutgers and is based off of superior performance in the execution of the honors thesis, as well as superior academic performance.
Sri was also awarded the William B. Foster Award recognizing academic and research performance from the Life Sciences Department.
Congrats Sri and Roshni!
Senior Dhruvi Desai Wins Poster Award
Dhruvi Desai, a senior in the Barker Lab, recently won second prize for her poster entitled “Whole Brain Mapping of Lateral Preoptic Area Inputs” at the axon 4.0 Conference. Dhruvi’s poster is the culmination of her hard and independent work on an anatomical tracing project in the laboratory over the past year. Congrats Dhruvi!
Axon is an undergraduate research conference organized by the Nu Rho Psi chapters at Rutgers and SUNY.
Grossman Innovation Prize
The Barker Lab was awarded the Grossman Innovation Prize. The Prize, named for Alan H. Grossman, provides funding for proof-of-concept studies that allow faculty innovators to develop product ideas with the hope that these nascent products might eventually transform into an independent business or attract venture capital funding.
Pilot Grant from The Rutgers Addiction Research Center
Dr. Barker and Dr. Zhiping Pang were awarded a pilot grant from the Rutgers Addiction Research Center. The award focuses on finding a novel chemical ligand to target the lateral habenula and to determine how long-term inhibition of the lateral habenula might contribute to pain relief and reinforcement.
Barker Lab awarded New Jersey Health Foundation Awaed
The Barker Lab was awarded a grant from the New Jersey Health Foundation entitled “Developing a Targeted Pharmacotherapy for Pain Without Abuse Liability”. The one-year pilot grant focuses on finding a new pharmacotherapy for pain that might replace opioid therapeutics.
Chris O'Brien Awarded Predoctoral Fellowship from NIDA
Barker Lab Graduate Student Chris O’Brien was recently awarded an F31 Predoctoral National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). His project, entitled Molecular and Neuroanatomical Processes of Opioid addiction, focuses on how stress changes individual susceptibility to opioid abuse, as well as the behaviors that might help to predict this individual susceptibility.
Jennifer Mejaes accepted into the PhD to Industry Pathway Program
Barker Lab graduate student Jennie Mejaes was recently accepted into the Rutgers PhD Industry Pathways Program as part of the inaugural class.
The goal of the program is to help PhD students to pursue careers in industry by providing opportunities for professional development, specialized coursework, seminars, training in research techniques, and networking opportunities.
We’re excited to see the kinds of opportunities this will open for Jennie and other Rutgers PhD students. Congrats Jennie!
Our work with Elyssa Margolis is now Published!
A few months ago, we broke the news of a preprint with Elyssa Margolis’ lab at UCSF and Marisela Morales’ lab at NIDA. We’re now excited to say that this work has been published in Nature Communications.
In this work, we discovered that Mu-opioid agonists can drive analgesia by inhibiting the lateral habenula, and that this effect mainly relies on Mu-positive cells in the lateral preoptic area. What’s most important about this discovery, is that this analgesia requires the presence of ongoing pain. In other words, this circuit provides a mechanism only for pain relief, and does not support opioid reward. This provides an important way by which we might induce pain relief without worrying about many of the adverse effects of opioid treatments, including sedation, respiratory depression, or the risk for opioid abuse.
Check out our new paper on individual differences in opioid abuse susceptibilty!
The lab recently published a paper in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, led by graduate student Chris O’Brien along with support from undergraduate students Roshni Vemireddy and Uzma Mohammed.
In the paper, we use a large battery of behavioral tests to determine the types of behavioral predictors that might indicate which individuals are most prone to opioid abuse after taking opioids across a window of time similar to a prescription. As a part of this, we also examined the influence of individual history, examining how traumatic stress might change the relevant predictors. We discovered that a susceptibility to negative mood states was a key predictor in control mice, and that the phenotype shifted following traumatic stress, such that mice who developed paradoxically high reward seeking and low thresholds for pain were those most likely to exhibit heightened drug-seeking.
Our findings provide some key messages for thinking about patients at risk in clinical settings, suggesting that targeted testing or questions could provide insights into the individuals at the greatest risk for future opioid abuse.
Ashley Crawley receives Henry Rutgers Award
Senior Ashley Crawley was awarded the Henry Rutgers Award for her honors thesis entitled “The Neuroscience of Addiction: Longitudinal Changes in the Responses of the Brain’s Striatal Regions across Prolonged Drug Use.”
The Henry Rutgers Scholar Award recognizes graduating seniors who have completed outstanding independent research projects leading to a thesis. The award is the highest achievement at Rutgers for an honors thesis. Students receiving the award are recognized Rutgers wide in the commencement program and receive a substantial prize.
Senior Ashley Crawley Featured by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences
Ashley Crawley, one of our star seniors, was recently interviewed by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences about her Rutgers experience. Ashley will be leaving us soon to begin graduate school at UCLA with some amazing colleagues. We’re sad to see her leave, but excited to see all of the places she will go.
A new preprint with our collaborator Dr. Elyssa Margolis of UCSF is now available
Our latest preprint with Dr. Elyssa Margolis just went live this week at BioRxiv. In this paper we demonstrate that mu opioid receptors in the lateral habenula are important for driving pain relief and negative reinforcement. Moreover, we demonstrate for the first time that the primary input to the lateral habenula responsible for this pain relief is the lateral preoptic area (LPO) of the hypothalamus.
Neurons in the LPO responsible for signaling pain are glutamatergic, and these neurons appear to become sensitized in a mouse model of chronic pain. However, these signals can be blocked by inhibition at presynaptic mu opioid receptors. What is particularly exciting about this story is that the lateral preoptic- lateral habenula pathway can drive pain relief, but does not appear to support positive reinforcement and may therefore be an important target for driving pain relief without the liability for opioid addiction.
The Barker Lab's First Pre-print is Live!
The first preprint from the Barker Lab was released this week. This paper describes our development of analysis software for Fiber Photometry imaging of calcium and neurotransmitter sensors.
The software for the photometry Modular Analysis Tool (pMAT) can be found via the GitHub Link.
New Collaborative Paper out in Neuron
Today our collaborative paper with the Morales Lab at the National Institute on Drug Abuse was released in Neuron.
This work demonstrates the importance of an excitatory projection from the Lateral Hypothalamic Area to the Ventral Tegmental Area in producing innate defensive behaviors. The paper is a true tour-de-force by first author Flavia Barbano! We’re so excited to see this work finally in press!
A Flurry of Summer Fellowships
While the Barker Lab has been hit hard in many ways by the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve also recently had a lot to be thankful for!
In addition to the McNair Fellowship earned by returning student Ashley Crawley, we recently learned that returning Lab member Uzma Mohammed and new lab member Kaitlyn Caballero were both awarded Cooper Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships! This fellowship is a generous gift from Dr. Dorothy Cooper in memory of her husband David Cooper that supports students majoring in Psychology as they pursue summer research. In addition, new lab student Samantha Rozario was awarded an Aresty Summer Research Fellowship. These fellowships are part of an endowment from Jerome and Lorraine Aresty to encourage undergraduate research at Rutgers New Brunswick.
These fellowships are especially precious this summer and we are incredibly grateful for the support!
Ashley Crawley is named a 2020 McNair Scholar
We just learned that Ashley was accepted into the 2020 cohort for the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate achievement program here at Rutgers and we couldn’t be more proud!
The McNair program is a very competitive program that helps students to pursue a doctoral degree by providing faculty mentoring, network building, support from other McNair Scholars and other professional development activities.
Ashley works incredibly hard and we can think of no one more deserving of such an honor.
“Whether or not you reach your goals in life depends entirely on how well you prepare for them and how badly you want them. You're eagles! Stretch your wings and fly to the sky.”
– Ronald E. McNair
Barker Lab Senior Pavan Yecham Inspires new Freshman interested in Science and Health
Our Senior undergraduate, Pavan Yecham, just finished teaching his first college course with mentoring from Dr. Barker. The Rutgers First-Year Interest Group Seminars (FIGS) program allows exceptional Seniors like Pavan to create lesson plans, schedule laboratory tours, and to help quickly set new freshman off on their career paths. We were so happy to participate in this wonderful program and look forward to supporting it in the future.
The Barker Lab was awarded an NJ ACTS grant
A collaborative project between Dr. Barker and Dr. Catherine Jensen Peña was just awarded a pilot project grant from the New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science. This collaborative project focuses on pain as a trigger for opioid dependence in the context of epigenetic susceptibility.
Dr. Barker is Featured by NJDiscover
Calvin Schwartz recently visited the Barker Lab for a light-hearted discussion about the lab itself and all things surrounding the brain.
It was fun to tackle each and every one of Calvin’s questions, including questions about about the state of drug addiction and mental health in the state of NJ and in the the United States as a whole, future ways to interface the brain with computers, and of course the goals the brand new lab hopes to accomplish.
The full interview can be found here.