Nathalie Pinkerton Earns NSF CAREER Award For Developing Nanoparticle Tools To Study Pain Signaling

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Nathalie Pinkerton, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, for a CAREER Award, its most prestigious award for young scientists and researchers. The $579,000 award will be used to develop light responsive nanoparticles to study the way pain signals are transmitted in sensory neurons, with an overarching goal of better understanding the mechanisms driving chronic pain.

Pinkerton, who leads the Pinkerton Research Group, develops responsive soft materials for bio-applications ranging from controlled drug delivery to medical imaging. The group uses tools from chemical and materials engineering, nanotechnology, chemistry and biology to create these materials via scalable synthetic processes in order to study how they behave in biological systems.

“Nathalie Pinkerton’s work perfectly embodies the vision of engineering health that drives research here at New York University,” said Juan de Pablo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology at New York University and Executive Dean of NYU Tandon. “This award is an important recognition of her cutting edge discoveries at the intersection of chemical and biomolecular engineering, materials science and medicine.”

Chronic pain affects millions of Americans and remains notoriously difficult to treat without medication like opioids, which have long term personal and societal effects. While scientists have long studied pain receptors on the surface of sensory nerve cells, new evidence suggests these receptors may continue sending pain signals even after they are pulled inside the cell, a hidden process that current tools cannot directly observe.

“In the last five years, biologists have come to realize that persistent pathological signaling involved in chronic pain manifests from these receptors that have been taken into the cells through endocytosis,” Pinkerton says. “Now we are left with a lack of understanding of how important that intracellular signaling is relative to the surface signaling, and knowing which one is more or less important will help us design better drugs in the future.”

The NSF CAREER-backed project aims to illuminate this mystery using tiny, light-responsive nanoparticles. Designed to enter sensory neurons, these particles remain inactive until exposed to light. When illuminated, they release molecules that can switch off pain-signaling receptors, while simultaneously emitting fluorescence to reveal exactly where inside the cell that disruption occurs. In essence, they act as microscopic light switches that both control and report on pain signaling.

“When designing biological probes where spatial and temporal control are especially important, light is a wonderful trigger,” says Pinkerton. “For the most part, it doesn't damage the cells, and you can focus it precisely so that you only illuminate your area of interest. That makes it very valuable for exploring the basic functions of cells.”

The work will build on Pinkerton’s previous work, particularly her development of Sequential NanoPrecipitation (SNaP), a nano-precipitation technique that offers control over nanoparticle properties as well as scalability. This technique enables scientists to manufacture polymeric particles, including drug-carrying particles, that maintain their structural and chemical integrity from lab settings to mass production — an essential step toward bringing them to market. Pinkerton will use the SNaP system to help build the nanoparticle probes for this project.

By establishing design rules for these self-reporting, light-activated probes, the research could open a new window into the biology of chronic pain. Beyond pain research, the technology may become a broadly useful tool in cell biology. The work could help identify new targets for safer, non-opioid therapies while training the next generation of scientists in cutting-edge biotechnology.