Bradley Taylor, PhD

Dr. Taylor’s laboratory investigates the mechanisms through which inflammation or injury produces changes in the peripheral nerve, spinal cord, and brain, leading to a transition from acute pain to chronic pathological pain. They explore innovative ideas using state-of-the art techniques to better understand the molecular neurobiology of pain sensitization and opioid dependence. For example, key projects are studying the contribution of endogenous neuropeptide receptor signaling to the suppression of chronic pain to answer the question: “after a traumatic injury, how does the body prevent the development of chronic pain?” By better understanding the body’s solutions to prevent the transition from acute to chronic pain, Dr. Taylor’s laboratory hopes to contribute to the development and validation of new pharmacotherapeutic approaches. In the long term, these could replace addictive opioid medications and become available to treat patients with intractable pain who cannot tolerate opioids. The laboratory has successfully competed for more than $17 million in continuous external research grant funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1999.

As of 2022, Dr. Taylor has published over 110 peer-reviewed research and review articles, over three-quarters of them as first or senior author, including a manuscript published in Science in 2013 on the discovery that constitutive activity of opioid receptors leads to long-term pain relief, which not only has proven to be significant in the scientific community, but also gained media attention in BusinessWeek, New Scientist, and the journal Nature.

Trained in pharmacology, biochemistry, physiology, and animal behavior, Dr. Taylor has more than three decades of working experience with advanced in vivo monitoring of neurotransmitter release, functional neuroanatomy using fluorescence microscopy, cardiovascular telemetric recordings, Cre transgenics and conditional gene expression in vivo, patch-clamp electrophysiology and Ca2+ imaging in live central nervous system (CNS) slices, in vivo pharmacology, and behavioral and molecular models of chronic pain and opioid dependence. These technical capabilities, combined with his excitement for innovation in neurobiology, allow his laboratory to continuously advance the research frontier in translational medicine. They explore innovative ideas using state-of-the art techniques to better understand the molecular neurobiology of pain sensitization and opioid dependence, and thus contribute to new pharmacotherapeutic approaches to the development of analgesic drugs.