Jacoba (Cobi) J. Heijnen, PhD

Jacoba (Cobi) Heijnen is one of the founding scientists of the field of psychoneuroimmunology. She received the first department chairmanship in psychoneuroimmunology in Europe and is highly active in the field. She performs human and preclinical animal research focusing on cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal damage, rodent cognition and motoric behavior, and therapeutic targets as neuroprotectants. Early in her career, she discovered a crucial T-cell subset, the T regulatory cell, which plays an important role in preventing autoimmune reactions and has a regulatory effect in brain damage and peripheral nerve damage. She melded the fields of brain–immune communications and pathology by studying the influence of the neuroendocrine system on the immune response of patients with autoimmune diseases.

Dr. Heijnen conducts studies of biological mechanisms and biomarkers underlying a variety of illness conditions—for example, pain, stress, fatigue, depression, hypoxic–ischemic brain damage, arthritis, sarcoidosis, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, and post-traumatic stress syndrome—with the ultimate goal of identifying efficacious therapeutic targets. She analyzes clinical inflammatory symptoms, serum cytokine profiles and ex vivo cytokine production, glucocorticoid and adrenergic receptor expression and function, and mRNA expression and genetic polymorphisms in specific genes. She has also explored fundamental intracellular mechanisms of stress, pain and fatigue; these studies identified intracellular kinases that govern the transition from acute to chronic pain.

Dr. Heijnen is considered a founding researcher in the area of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) transplantation as a neuroregenerative treatment for the repair of neonatal hypoxic–ischemic brain damage. She investigated mechanisms of apoptosis after hypoxia–ischemia in order to find therapeutic targets to inhibit apoptosis, focusing especially on the inflammatory pathway regulators nuclear factor κB and c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), and the mitochondrial p53/JNK pathway. She established the safety of MSC transplantation, showing that MSCs accumulate only in damaged areas and disappear completely in three days, and was the first to show that intranasal transplantation of MSC is a very effective route for introducing MSCs into the brain.

At MD Anderson, Dr. Heijnen seeks to extend her vast experience with neuroprotectants and neuroregeneration to understanding the mechanisms and treatment of cancer-related stress, pain, fatigue, and chemotherapy-induced cognitive deficits, or chemobrain. Her group has established a model of chemobrain in the mouse and have published evidence of the powerful effects of mitochondrial protection in the prevention of chemotherapy-induced pain. Her earlier work on intracellular kinases, inflammatory pain mechanisms, and T cells is now contributing to her group’s efforts to study chemotherapy-induced and inflammatory pain.