About Brian Wainger, MD, PhD

Dr. Wainger is Assistant Professor in Anesthesiology and Neurology at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. He studied molecular biology as an undergraduate at Princeton University and ion channel physiology in the MD/PhD program at Columbia University. He then completed medical residency in the Mass General Brigham Neurology Program followed by a clinical fellowship in Pain Medicine at MGH, research fellowship with Clifford Woolf at Boston Children's Hospital and clinical investigator training through the Harvard Master's Program in Clinical and Translational Investigation. His clinical expertise spans the intersection of neurology and pain medicine.

Clinical Interests:

Treats:

Locations

Mass General Anesthesia and Pain Medicine
55 Fruit St.
Gray Bigelow Building
Suite 444
Boston, MA 02114
Phone: 617-726-3030

Medical Education

  • MD, Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons
  • Residency, Brigham and Women's Hospital
  • Fellowship, Massachusetts General Hospital

American Board Certifications

  • Neurology, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
  • Pain Medicine, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology

Accepted Insurance Plans

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Research

Brian Wainger's lab fuses electrophysiology and stem cell biology to explore how abnormal neuronal physiology contributes to diseases of the motor and sensory nervous systems. Working with motor neurons derived from ALS patients and healthy controls, Dr. Wainger performed fundamental electrophysiological characterization and identified motor neuron hyperexcitability in ALS patient-derived motor neurons (Wainger et al., 2014). Mechanistic analysis of the motor neurons led to the identification of a novel therapeutic candidate, which will be investigated in a clinical trial.

On the sensory neuron front, Dr. Wainger developed a lineage reprogramming technique for derivation of pain sensing (nociceptor) neurons from human fibroblasts (Wainger et al., 2014). This technology has already revealed novel insights through disease modeling of familial painful neuropathy and promises to be valuable in the development of drug screens using human neurons.

Publications

  • Select Publications:

    • Wainger BJ, Buttermore ED, Oliveira JT, Mellin C, Lee S, Afshar Saber W, Wang A, Ichida JK, Chiu IM, Barrett L, Huebner EA, Bilgin C, Tsujimoto N, Brenneis C, Rubin LL, Eggan K, Woolf CJ. Modeling pain in vitro using noceptors reprogrammed from fibroblasts. Nature Neuroscience, 2014, in press.
    • Wainger BJ, Kiskinis EK, Mellin C, Wiskow O, Han S, Sandoe J, Perez NP, Williams AL, Lee S, Boulting G, Berry JD, Brown RH, Cudkowicz ME, Bean BP, Eggan K, Woolf CJ. Intrinsic membrane hyperexcitability of ALS patient-derived motor neurons. Cell Reports 2014;7:1-11

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