Dr. Michael Wainberg

We study the genetic and molecular mechanisms that cause chronic pain, with the goal of improving how these conditions are prevented, diagnosed, and treated. We co-founded the Chronic Pain Genomics Consortium out of a belief that large biobank studies could help address the unmet needs of chronic pain patients, both by finding genetic risk factors that could reveal therapeutic opportunities and by identifying broader biological mechanisms through which chronic pain develops and persists.  

Our first effort led to the discovery of the first genetic risk factors for fibromyalgia, a chronic pain syndrome involving widespread pain and tenderness, fatigue, and problems with sleep, memory and mood. This work was widely covered in the European press, including in The Independent, The Daily Mail, RTÉ, El País, la Repubblica, and Bild. We see fibromyalgia as only the beginning of a broader effort to understand chronic pain: we are now studying other conditions including chronic pelvic pain and complex regional pain syndrome, a rare and often severe limb pain disorder.  

We also develop computational methods for genetics and genomics. Better computational tools help researchers make sense of increasingly large and complex genomic datasets, accelerating discoveries across many areas of human disease. We developed brisc, a fast general-purpose toolkit for analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing data. Other projects in the lab include using large language models to identify causal genes underlying genetic associations with disease, characterizing the patterns of co-inheritance of rare mutations using large-scale whole-genome sequencing data from the UK Biobank, and improving the performance of genetic risk scores across individuals from diverse ancestries.