News

A report about Robert Bonin was published in Curium, a scientific magazine targeting youth.  In the article, professor Bonin explains what is chronic pain, and results of his research to better understand it, and to improve its treatment.  Read the article here (in French only):  Robert Bonin - Jeune chercheur étoiles des Fonds de recherche du Québec

Congratulations to Isabel Plasencia who won the second prize for presentation at the second edition of the Pain Talks organised by the Quebec Network of Junior Pain Investigators.  The event took place April 28 at McGill's Thomson House.  Isabel's presentation was titled " Painful disinhibition".

A recent publication in Nature Medicine co-authored by Robert Bonin and Yves De Koninck offers new hope for people addicted to morphine and fentanyl.  By  investigating the underlying causes of withdrawal symptoms, the researchers identified a protein located in immune cells of the spinal cord called pannexin-1 as a major player, which lead them to look for drugs that block pannexin-1 as a way to alleviate symptoms.  The team found a drug previously approved to treat gout, called probenecid, that worked in this way.

The director of the Neurophotonics Centre, Yves De Koninck, will receive the Canadian Pain Society's 2017 Distinguished Career Award. This award recognizes Dr. De Koninck's longstanding contributions to pain research.
The award will be given at the next Canadian Pain Society meeting, in May 2017 in Halifax.

http://www.canadianpainsociety.ca/?page=AwardsGrant

Sentinel North, a research initiative led by Yves De Koninck and Marcel Babin from Université Laval, and funded through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, aims to better understand the Canadian North through the use of advanced optics technologies.  Its goal is to improve our understanding of humanity, its environment and the impact environmental changes are having on humans and their health in the North. Sentinel North was recently awarded $98 million over seven years, the largest subsidy in the history of Université Laval.

Yves De Koninck was recently appointed to the Royal Society of Canada for "seminal contributions to understanding how neurons communicate at the cellular and molecular levels, in normal and pathological pain. Equally ground-breaking are his contributions to developing novel photonics technologies to push the frontiers of neuroscience".

View the Royal Society of Canada - Class of 2015 full listing.

Congratulations!

Yves De Koninck was awarded an honoris causa doctorate from the Université de Montréal for his exceptional contributions to research in neuroscience, and specifically in research to relieve pain.  The rector of the Université de Montréal highlighted Dr. De Koninck's work:

Congratulations to Robert Bonin, who was awarded the BrainStar of the year award at the 2015 Canadian Neuroscience Meeting in Vancouver. He was recognized as the top recipient of all the 2014 Brain Star awardees.

2014 - Robert Bonin (Brain Star of the year)

Article in Nature Neuroscience: A spinal analog of memory reconsolidation enables reversal of hyperalgesia.

Robert Bonin - Mars 2015

Publication : A Spinal Analogue of Memory Reconsolidation Enables Reversal of Hyperalgesia  in : Nature Neuroscience 
 

The Canadian Neurophotonics Platform, a multicentre research initiative led by Yves De Koninck, held its lauch meeting December 16-17 2014 in Québec city.  

This initiative, which was awarded 3,3M$ from the Canadian Brain Research Fund, aims to bring together expertise from across Canada to develop and maximize exploitation of leading-edge photonics technologies for the study, diagnostics and treatment of brain diseases.

Recent discoveries from the De Koninck lab are cited in a article about new propects for treating pain in the 2014 end of year edition of Scientific American, devoted to world-changin ideas.

Read it here (subscription required)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/prospects-for-treating-chronic...

Yves De Koninck was interviewed in Le Devoir newspaper about the importance of funding provided by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé for the vitality of research in Québec.  

Read the article in Le Devoir (in French): Le FRQS, un soutien essentiel pour les chercheurs

Listen to Yves De Koninck in conversation with Kerri Smith explain the recent publication by Bonin and De Koninck in Nature Neuroscience.
Go to the Nature website and select the third segment.

Francesco Ferrini, Post-Doctoral fellow Yves De Koninck's laboratory, was recognized as one of the top three Brain Star awardees of 2014 by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, for an article published in Nature Neuroscience (Ferrini, Trang et al.). This prize was shared with Tuan Trang, co-first author of the publication.

Découvrir, the magazine of the Association Francophone pour le Savoir (ACFAS), published an interview about chronic pain with Quebec Pain Research Network founder Yves De Koninck. Read the interview on the ACFAS website: http://www.acfas.ca/publications/decouvrir/2014/05/douleur-chronique-sort-silence

Guillaume Lavertu - Mai 2014

Publication : Enhancing K–Cl co-transport restores normal spinothalamic sensory coding in a neuropathic pain model,  BRAIN, 137 ; 724-738, 2014

Université Laval and Roche recently signed a collaborative research agreement to test promising compounds for several disorders of the brain, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Research done in the YDK lab are recognized as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2013, according to Le Soleil newspaper: 

Identifying the part of the cell that causes a disease. Understanding where, exactly, the mechanism breaks.  Finding a drug to repair it.  In biomedical research, this is probably what approaches the definition of a »hat trick» And it is what the team of Yves De Koninck, neuroscientist at Université Laval, have just done in the fight against chronic pain.

Congratulations to Yves De Koninck, who was named the new Scientific Director of the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec.  Learn more about this nomination here:

http://www.beauportexpress.com/Communaut%C3%A9/2013-10-29/article-345236...

The identification of compounds that can restore normal chloride levels in cells shows promise to treat several neurological and psychiatric disorders, including epilepsy, motor spasticity, stress, anxiety, schizophrenia, morphine-induced hyperalgesia and chronic pain.  New results published by the De Koninck laboratory in Nature Medicine shows one such compounds was able to alleviate hypersensitivity in a rat chronic pain model.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation produced a video about the Neurophotonics Centre featuring an interview with Yves De Koninck, in which he explains how neurophotonics techniques are used to understand chronic pain, and could also be used eventually to treat this condition. In French.

Yves de Koninck was named researcher of the month of July by Canadians for Health Research.  Here is an excerpt from his profile on the CHR website:

A Pioneer in Understanding Pain

Read A multimodal micro-optrode - a blog post in openoptogenetics about the multimodal micro-optrodes developed by Yoann Lechasseur, Suzie Dufour and the rest of the YDK lab team and collaborators:

http://openoptogeneticsblog.org/?p=550

The post discusses two papers

Recent discoveries published in Nature Neuroscience "identifies a molecular pathway by which morphine can increase pain, and suggests potential new ways to make morphine effective for more patients" says Yves De Koninck, senior author of the paper. 

The research not only identifies a target pathway to suppress morphine-induced pain but teases apart the pain hypersensitivity caused by morphine from tolerance to morphine, two phenomena previously considered to be caused by the same mechanisms.

Les professeurs Daniel Côté et Yves De Koninck explique la recherche en biophotonique à l'émission Le Code Chastenay, à Télé-Québec

Voir le reportage sur le site du Code Chastenay à Télé-Québec

Research leading to the development of a micro-optrode allowing optical and electrical recording from a single neuron in vivo was recognized as one of the top 10 discoveries of the year by Québec Science. Congratulations to Yoann Lechasseur and the whole team!

http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/les-10-decouvertes-2011/1-Lumiere-sur-les...

In two articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), Yves De Koninck, Jean-Martin Beaulieu, Paul Wiseman and their teams describe a new technique, spatial intensity distribution analysis, to study protein-protein interactions in intact tissue by optical microscopy.  

Congratulations to Jeffrey Coull, Ph. D. receives the 2006 prize for best PhD thesis Association of Quebec graduate deans, in association with the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ)