Therapeutics for brain and spinal cord injuries
Stephen Waxman's research defined the ion channel architecture of nerve fibers and demonstrated its importance for conduction of nerve impulses in the spinal cord and brain (Science, 1985). He discovered the molecular events responsible for recovery of conduction after demyelination of spinal cord axons, which supports remission in multiple sclerosis (PNAS, 2004). He has made pivotal discoveries that explain pain after nerve injury. In translational leaps from laboratory to humans, he combined molecular genetics, molecular biology, and biophysics in molecule-to-man studies to demonstrate the contribution of ion channels to human pain (Trends in Molec.Med, 2005; PNAS, 2006), and led an international coalition that identified sodium channel mutations as causes of peripheral neuropathy (PNAS, 2012). He used atomic-level modeling to advance pharmacogenomics in a paper (JAMA Neurology, 2016) that was accompanied by an editorial stating, "There are still relatively few examples in medicine where molecular reasoning has been rewarded with a comparable degree of success." An entirely new class of non-addictive pain medications, based in large part on his work, is in early clinical trials.
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Biography
Waxman is the Bridget Flaherty Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Pharmacology and served as Chairman of Neurology at Yale from 1986 to 2009. He is Director of Yale's Neuroscience and Regeneration Research Center. He has published over 800 papers and has been cited over 60,000 times in the literature. He has served on the editorial boards of Annals of Neurology, TINS, Nature Reviews Neurology, Journal of Physiology, Brain, and Trends in Molecular Medicine. Waxman's many awards include the Dystel Prize and Wartenberg Award, the Middleton Award, the British Physiological Society's Annual Prize (an accolade he shares with Nobel laureates Andrew Huxley, John Eccles, and Alan Hodgkin), and the Julius Axelrod Prize.
