A multidisciplinary team that includes cancer and neuroscience experts, research scientists and clinicians is looking to improve the understanding and identification of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN).
Dr Jason Potas was awarded $40,000 in the 2018 round of UNSW Medicine Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction Theme and SPHERE Clinical Academic Group (CAG) Collaborative Research Seed Funding for the project, Understanding brainstemsensory coding in pursuit of early detection of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy.
Name: Dr Jason Potas
Position/s: Senior Lecturer, Augmented Sensorimotor Systems Team Leader
How has the Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction Theme and CAG enabled you to develop your research interests?
The Theme and CAG has provided us with seed funding that will enable us to generate preliminary data for larger grant rounds, such as NHMRC. The application process itself has encouraged us to seek collaborations with others outside our immediate circle. Establishing these connections is very valuable, not only for this, but for future projects too. We are grateful for the seed funding provided by the Theme and CAG, as well as the new connections that we have forged out of the process of submitting a proposal, because funding is getting harder every year. In this climate, every bit of funding helps and making connections with others gives us the opportunity to be part of larger research clusters which collectively have a better chance obtaining larger funding grants and contributing to great science.
Your project Understanding brainstemsensory coding in pursuit of early detection of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, was successful in the 2018 round of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction Theme and CAG Collaborative Research Seed Funding. Can you please tell us about the project?
Chemotherapy results in peripheral neuropathies with life-long morbidity. However, by the time patients develop symptoms, it can be too late to avoid permanent damage. We aim to improve our knowledge of tactile sensory processing in the nervous system for a better understanding of the pathophysiology behind chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) and improve the identification of patients at risk of CIPN before they develop symptoms to avoid permanent damage.
Our sense of touch begins from the skin. Sensory information is transformed from mechanical changes at the skin’s surface and converted into electrical signals that are carried to the brain by distinct sensory channels. One of the first key regions where these separate sensory channels converge are the dorsal column nuclei, which reside in the brainstem. Members of our team have built a specialised mechanical stimulator, which can be tuned to selectively activate these distinct tactile sensory channels by presenting designed buzzing patterns to the skin’s surface. By activating these channels separately, or in combinations, we can observe how the neural code for tactile information is transformed by the dorsal column nuclei.
We will observe this process in healthy rats because they share most of the skin receptor types found in humans. Once we have unveiled some of the rules that describe the transformation of tactile information into dorsal column nuclei neural coding in normal animals, we can then observe how these rules are altered in a rat model of CIPN. In other words, we are using the response from the dorsal column nuclei as a read-out of peripheral nerve functional integrity.
What impact do you imagine the project will have?
From this new knowledge, we plan to develop stimulation patterns that are visible to intact, but not injured, nervous systems. This would enable us to make a sensory test for the sense of touch, similar to the Ishihara test for colour-blindness. Our touch test would work in the same way as the Ishihara test: it will ask the patient to distinguish between stimuli, in this case buzzing-like patterns, but which can only be discriminated with an intact, healthy peripheral nervous system.
The long-term outcome of this research is therefore to develop a reliable diagnostic device for identifying patients at risk of CIPN before symptoms develop and thereby avoiding permanent damage from chemotherapy. Currently, diagnosis requires a trained neurophysiologist; we will strive to deliver a reliable diagnostic device that can be used by anyone, including patients for home monitoring.
How will the project support new collaborations?
The application process itself has already resulted in the formation of new collaborations. The assembled team for this project contains cancer and neuroscience experts, basic research scientists and clinicians. Our team includes experts in tactile sensory neuroscience in both animals and humans, biomedical engineering, and a clinician who specialises in cancer. We will use this seed funding to generate strong preliminary data from animal studies which will enable us to apply for a larger NHMRC grant. In that grant, we intend on extending our study from animals to look at different stages of CIPN severity, and then test our stimulation parameters on human cancer patients, with the goal of eventually developing a new diagnostic device with commercial potential. These multifaceted ambitions demand a multidisciplinary team such as ours.