Clifford Woolf, MD
Neuroscience Center at Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital – East
Building 149
13th Street
Charlestown, MA 02129

Telephone: 617-724-6754
Email: cwoolf@partners.org

Biography:
Dr Woolf is the first incumbent of the Richard Kitz Chair of Anesthesia Research at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. After training for his MD and Ph.D. at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg South Africa, Dr Woolf moved to England in 1978, where he worked at University College London for close on 20 years, latterly as a Professor of Neurobiology and as an Honorary Consultant at University College London Hospital.

In 1997 Dr Woolf moved to Boston and established the Neural Plasticity Research Group based in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the Massachusetts General Hospital and which is a part of the Neuroscience Program at Harvard Medical School.

Research Program:

Current research program:
1. Analgesic target identification and validation
2. Development of new clinical outcome measures for analgesic drug development.
3. Post-translational processing of sodium channels and ligand-gated ion channels.
4. Differential gene expression in sensory and spinal cord neurons
5. Sensory and dorsal horn neuron survival and degeneration
6. Spinal cord regeneration.
7. Pathophysiology of sensory neuropathies

Publications:
Click here to access a full PubMed search on Dr. Woolf

1. Woolf CJ, Salter MW (2000) Neuronal plasticity -increasing the gain in pain. Science 288:1765-1768.

2. Benn SC, Perrelet D, Kato AC, Scholz J, Decosterd I, Mannion RJ, Bakowska JC, Woolf CJ. Hsp27 upregulation and phosphorylation is required for injured sensory and motor neuron survival Neuron 2002 36:45-56.

3. Costigan M, Befort K, Karchewski L, Griffin RS, Da'Urso D, Allchorne A, Sitarski J, Mannion JW, Pratt RE, Woolf CJ. Replicate high-density rat genome oligonucleotide microarrays reveal hundreds of regulated genes in the dorsal root ganglion after peripheral nerve injury. BMC Neurosci. 2002 3:16.

4. Scholz J, Woolf, CJ, Can we conquer pain? Nature Neuroscience 2002 5: 1062-1067.

5. Costigan M, Samad TA, Allchorne A, Lanoue C, Tate S, Woolf CJ. High basal expression and injury-induced down regulation of two regulator of G-protein signaling transcripts, RGS3 and RGS4 in primary sensory neurons. Mol Cell Neurosci. 2003 24:106-16.

6. Samad TA, Srinivasan A, Karchewski LA, Jeong SJ, Campagna JA, Ji RR, Fabrizio DA, Zhang Y, Lin HY, Bell E, Woolf CJ. DRAGON: a member of the repulsive guidance molecule-related family of neuronal- and muscle-expressed membrane proteins is regulated by DRG11 and has neuronal adhesive properties. J Neurosci. 2004 24:2027-36.

Related links:
• http://www.mgh.harvard.edu/nprg/