Queen’s Professor Sebastien Talbot has been studying pain for nearly 20 years.
In April, Talbot, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, received a $200,000 Brain Canada Momentum Grant. The grant enables researchers who have previously received Brain Canada funding to build on and explore new dimensions of their research.
Talbot is studying the neuro-immune axis in cancer and exploring whether existing neurological drugs could be repurposed for cancer treatment.
The nervous system contains sensory neurons called nociceptors which detect potentially harmful stimuli like heat or injury. The nervous and immune systems evolved together to help the body recognize and respond to danger.
“The way that the body detects danger has always been super fascinating to me,” he said in an interview with The Journal. “Every time you get hurt, you will have local neuroimmune interaction. Usually, it’s great. It helps with cleaning the wound, but sometimes this normal interaction will become pathologic.”
One major area of interest is the nervous system’s role in enabling cancer, a focus of Talbot’s laboratory.
“I started to look a little bit into cancer neuroscience at the end of my postdoc because I was interested in neuroimmune interaction and no one had really looked at it in the context of cancer,” he said.
Talbot joined Queen’s as a tenured associate professor in 2022, where his lab is based in Botterell Hall. He received an Early-Career Capacity Building Grant from Brain Canada in 2018, designed to support researchers within five years of their first academic appointment.
This funding helped him to set up his lab and begin generating data on the relationship between pain-detecting sensory neurons and cancer immunosurveillance, followed by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funding and a landmark paper in Nature, the world’s leading science journal.
“[Brain Canada] really have been absolutely instrumental in what they call a high-risk, high-reward grant […] funding something that’s perhaps riskier, because we have no idea if it’s going to work,” Talbot said.
Talbot’s lab uses melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer, as a model for cancer immunosurveillance. This is because the skin is densely innervated and the use of immunotherapy has been very successful in treating melanoma, though 50 per cent of patients still don’t respond, he explained.
Seeing opportunity to repurpose existing migraine drugs in treating melanoma, Talbot and his colleagues are seeking funding for what’s known as a “window of opportunity trial,” which gives patients the drug a month before they undergo tumour removal surgery.
“Now that we mix cancer and neuroscience together, the idea is we want to use a bunch of drugs that we use in neuroscience and see if it can be helpful in cancer, so we don’t need to discover the drug, we don’t need to test if the drug is toxic. We know it’s used in patients a lot of the time,” Talbot said.
Talbot received the follow-up Momentum Grant in April to study a different neuro-immune circuit, in a project titled “Opioid-Expressing B Cells Silence Tumor-Infiltrating Nociceptor Neurons.”
“We were able to find that if you block these pain-transmitting neurons, you would be able to increase responsiveness to different treatments against cancer, including immunotherapy, so blocking neurons might be improving immunotherapy responses,” he said.
Tumour-infiltrating B cells produce nociceptin, a natural opioid-like molecule which binds to receptors on nearby nociceptors, dampening pain-neuron activity. Higher expression of nociceptin has been linked to longer survival in patients. The research will explore nociceptin’s role in slowing down tumour growth, as well as test the efficacy of nociceptin-like drugs alongside standard PD-1-blocking immunotherapy, which unmasks cancer cells by blocking the PD-1 protein on T-cells.
Talbot’s lab’s broader goal is to understand how the body detects “danger” by building a systems-level framework of neuro‑immune communication.
Talbot hopes this work will reveal new ways to block harmful neuroimmune interactions that drive chronic disease and impair the immune system’s ability to fight tumours.
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biomedical, brain, professor, Research
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