From Bedside to Bench

ith five current R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — an accomplishment matched by fewer than 1% of principal investigators — and more than $14 million in NIH funding awarded to him since he joined TTUHSC in 2014, one might assume Volker Neugebauer, MD, PhD, was destined to be a scientist.

“I actually came from the humanities; I studied philosophy and theology as an undergraduate,” Neugebauer said. “I’m from Germany, and in that system, they frowned upon the empirical sciences that would just capture a very narrow aspect of the world versus philosophy and theology that deal with the world’s big questions.”

Following his undergraduate studies, Neugebauer, chair for the School of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, considered teaching high school, going as far as enrolling in the graduate track for teaching. Then a newspaper ad, announcing a fast-approaching deadline for medical school applications, caught his eye.

“I thought about maybe practicing in the countryside, interacting with people beyond just medicine and answering questions in this classical patient-physician interaction,” Neugebauer recalled. “That was my goal suddenly, and I got accepted into medical school. I still had no real interest in science.”

During his first year of medical school, Neugebauer enrolled in a neuroscience course. The department chair was on sabbatical, so a visiting scientist taught the class. It was the 1980s, and rather than teaching the medical curriculum, his lectures focused on aspects of science, new at that time, such as neuroplasticity (growth and reorganization of the brain’s neural networks) and the NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors that act as the brain’s neurotransmitter for excitement.

Neugebauer found those topics very interesting, and as the semester entered its final few weeks, he was the only student still enrolled in the neuroscience class. He and the visiting instructor discussed philosophy and neurobiological sciences. They also considered neuroplasticity in the amygdala in the context of epilepsy, the only function for which that part of the brain was known at the time.

Neugebauer eventually enrolled in a graduate program for neuroscience and was captivated by working in a lab. However, his enthusiasm was tempered because pain was the only topic being investigated by all neuroscience graduate students.

Neugebauer began studying peripheral nerve fibers, which was as far removed from the complex brain functions in the body as he could imagine. “Because everybody in that graduate program did pain research, I felt like I was so far away from what I really wanted to do with these complex questions about neuroplasticity in the brain,” he said.

Neugebauer’s dissertation addressed spinal cord neuroplasticity in the context of pain. During that process, he began to appreciate the complexity of pain. He thought about ways he could add pain research to his primary interest in understanding the brain and its cognitive aspects.

“My eventual discovery of neuroplasticity in the amygdala in pain brought me close to fulfilling my dream about studying complex brain functions, such as feelings and thought processes,” Neugebauer added.

Now, 30 years after becoming a clinically trained neuroscientist, Neugebauer serves as executive director and chief scientific officer at TTUHSC’s Garrison Institute on Aging. His responsibilities include oversight of Project FRONTIER, a longitudinal study of aging and cognitive decline in a multi-ethnic sample of adults living in rural communities. He also has received millions of dollars in grants and published more than 150 scientific papers in some of the most impactful journals in the world.

Although Neugebauer has researched other conditions such as addiction, epilepsy, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, the majority of his work has dealt with the relationship between pain and the amygdala.

“What makes pain unique is its unpleasantness,” Neugebauer said. “This is the emotional affective aspect of pain that cannot be explained in the peripheral nervous system or the spinal cord; it has to be in the brain, and the brain region that comes closest to encoding emotional affective aspects of things is the amygdala. I basically carved out my own niche by applying this to the pain field.”

Neugebauer has since become a renowned expert in pain research. It’s been a long road from a system that said such specialized scientific research provided an unrealistic and narrow view of the world. He occasionally reminds himself he once also felt that way.

“We need to put things in perspective when we do our work in the lab,” Neugebauer said. “Maybe it is a small part of the world, but we need to remember that a lot more could be out there than what we can capture in our experiments.”

– By Mark Hendricks