Jean-Philippe Vit, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr Vit joined the Board of Governors Gene Therapeutics Research Institute in January 2007. He is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr Luc Jasmin's team. Dr Vit has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anatomy at University of California, San Francisco. Current work in Dr Jasmin's group focuses on orofacial neuropathic pain.
Peripheral neuropathic pain is a condition resulting from a primary lesion or dysfunction of the peripheral nervous system. Neuropathic pain is resistant to common analgesics and is currently the focus of intense research aimed at developing alleviating treatments. A contributing factor to neuropathic pain is a change in the excitability of primary sensory neurons causing them to become spontaneously active or discharge at a much lower threshold than normal. Neuronal excitability is dependent on the composition of the perineuronal environment, which in sensory ganglia is largely regulated by a particular type of glial cells, the satellite glial cells (SGCs). A disruption of the ability of SGCs to maintain the perineuronal environment would be associated with altered excitability of primary sensory neurons, and would thus lead to abnormal sensory perception.
Dr Vit's work aims to:
1) Characterize genetic factors that may contribute to the appearance and the maintain of neuropathic pain. He is using RNA interference in vivo to transiently and locally knockdown target genes in the trigeminal ganglion which provides all the sensory innervation of the face. The novelty of this work is that the target genes are not expressed by sensory neurons but specifically by SGCs. Recently, Dr Vit was able to show that the sole inhibition of a SGC-specific potassium channel in the trigeminal ganglion (in absence of nerve injury) led to the behavioral aspect of orofacial neuropathic pain. Currently, other SGC-expressed genes related to extracellular potassium homeostasis or to glia-neuron communication are under investigation.
2) Develop gene therapeutics for the treatment of neuropathic pain. The novelty of the approach is that specifically in sensory ganglia, SGCs are genetically engineered to heal the neurons whose physiology is affected in neuropathic pain. To do so, adenoviral vectors are injected directly into the trigeminal ganglion. SGC-specific expression of the transgene will be achieved by using adenoviral vectors encoding the transgene under the control of a glia-specific promoter. Several transgenes with potential therapeutic activity are currently under investigation.
Dr Vit received his bachelor¿s degree in Cellular Biology and Physiology at the Paul Sabatier University of Toulouse, France. He earned his doctorate after being awarded a doctoral fellowship from `La Ligue Nationale Contre le Cancer'. Dr Vit conducted his doctorate at the Curie Institute in Paris, where he studied the involvement of ataxia telangiectasia (ATM) gene in the apoptotic response to ionizing radiation.
