Research and career
Diatchenko began her career in industry with 7 years in research and development at CLONTECH Laboratories (now Takara Bio USA) in Palo Alto,California. In 2000,her career in academia began as a Visiting Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Neurosensory Disorders at the University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill. She has continued since then to have roles in both academia and industry. Between 2000 –2013,she led her research group at the University of North Carolina,becoming a Full Professor in 2013. Since 2013,she has led a research group at McGill University,in Montreal,Canada,in the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain in the Faculty of Dentistry and Medicine. Her recruitment to McGill University included a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC), [4] which facilitated her work in creating a Human Pain Genetics Program at McGill. She continues to be involved in industry research through advisory board membership or as a consultant.
Diatchenko pioneered the field of human pain genetics,where she has substantively contributed to the current body of knowledge through her work. Her work has covered genetics and pharmaceutics. Diatchenko has been instrumental in identifying new pain drug targets through a reverse genetic approach that starts with human genetics and genomics,which has led to discovering pain genes and biological pathways that contribute to human pain. Her research program revealed a genetic variation in the human catechol-O-methyltransferase gene with pain sensitivity and the risk of chronic pain conditions (Hum. Mol. Genet.,2004;Science,2006),individual differences in responses to analgesic drugs being driven by genetics (Hum. Mol. Genet.,2009;Pain,2020),and the protective role of neutrophil-driven inflammation for pain resolution in patients with acute lower back pain,where inhibiting inflammation leads to short-term analgesia but long-term pain states (Sci.Transt.Med.,2022). [5] [6] [7]
Diatchenko also believes in and contributes to open science to advance our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of pain. Her lab's Human Pain Genetics Database (HPGdb) summarizes all extant data on the genetic contributors of pain and the Transcriptomics Pain Signatures Database (PSGS) summarizes all available data on genome-wide transcriptomics in human pain conditions and experimental pain models. Diatchenko has also been prolific in developing molecular genetic methodologies. She pioneered Suppression Subtractive Hybridization (SSH) nearly 30 years ago,which is still widely used and highly cited times (:Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.,U.S.A.,1996). She and colleagues have also developed a SMART technology (Biochem Biophys Res Commun.,1997),and Factorial reporter system that measures the activities of multiple transcription factors in a living cell. (Nat Methods,2008)
Diatchenko has been an active member of several professional societies,such as the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP),playing various roles in multiple committees. At IASP,in 2012,she founded and was Elected Chair of the Special Interest Group (SIG) in Genetics and Pain. She also consults for policy-making agencies such as the National Institutes of Health,the US National Academy of Sciences and the US Surgeon General of the United States.
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