Beth Winkelstein and Andrew Tsourkas Receive CSRS Award

Macrophage as a Potential Biomarker for Imaging Radicular Pain, a paper co-authored by Beth Winkelstein and Andrew Tsourkas, has been selected as the First Place Basic Science Research Award Paper by the Cervical Spine Research Society’s (CSRS) Research Committee. The research was performed by students Dan Hubbard (Ph.D. ’08) and Christine Weisshaar in Winkelstein’s Spine Pain Research Lab and student Dan Thorek (Ph.D. ’10) in Tsourkas’s Cellular and Molecular Imaging Lab. The paper will be presented at the 2010 CSRS Meeting in December.

Winkelstein is an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering. The broad goal of her research is to understand the mechanisms of injury that produce whiplash, sports-related, and other painful injuries. By combining biomechanical and immunological techniques, her lab can define the relationships between injury to the cervical spine/neck and physiological cascades of persistent pain.

Tsourkas is an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering. His research is focused on developing nanosensors that can be used to non-invasively image molecular markers of disease in a clinical setting. These imaging agents will allow for more informed diagnoses, detect diseases at an earlier stage, and provide a mechanism to quantify therapeutic response.

This paper represents a significant collaboration between the Winkelstein and Tsourkas laboratories to use innovative methods to image radicular pain.