Symptom Research

Cobi J. Heijnen, Ph.D. is the chair of the Symptom Research department. Heijnen joined our faculty as a Professor in 2012. She is one of three Principal Investigators leading the department's Neuroimmunology Laboratory, along with Annemieke Kavelaars, Ph.D., and Robert Dantzer, D.V.M., Ph.D. For the 15 years prior to joining MD Anderson, Heijnen served as Professor of Neuroimmunology and Chair of the Psychoneuroimmunology department at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Heijnen is one of the founding scientists of the field of psychoneuroimmunology. Her research focuses on cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal damage, rodent cognition and motoric behavior and therapeutic targets as neuroprotectants. Her more recent work seeks to understand the mechanisms and treatment of cancer-related stress, pain, fatigue and chemotherapy-induced cognitive deficits. She and her team have demonstrated that nasal application of mesenchymal stem cells repairs brain damage and can reverse existing chemobrain. On the prevention front, she has demonstrated that mitochondrial protectants prevent chemobrain and that pifithrin-µ and metformin can help prevent chemotherapy-induced neuropathy.

Charles S. Cleeland, Ph.D. is  the clinical research director for the Symptom Research department. He is the founder and initial chair of the department. He established the Pain Research group at the University of Wisconsin in 1979 and soon became an internationally recognized expert on the assessment and treatment of cancer pain. Cleeland and the Pain Research Group relocated to MD Anderson Cancer Center in 1996, and in March 2002 the Pain Research Group became the Department of Symptom Research. 

Cleeland has devoted much of his career to observational, longitudinal and clinical studies of pain and other symptoms related to cancer and its treatment. He has published extensively on the development of pain and other symptoms and related biological mechanisms, particularly the role of inflammatory cytokines in treatment-related pain and fatigue.

Annemieke Kavelaars, Ph.D. is the Director of the Neuroimmunology Laboratory within the Symptom Research department. With more than 20 years' experience as a researcher in the field of neuroimmunology, Kavelaars has developed a broad background in the field of brain, behavior, and immunity, working extensively with experimental animal models of pain in mice, including inflammatory and nerve damage models.

Kavelaars joined MD Anderson in 2012, when she and Drs. Cobi Heijnen and Robert Dantzer established the Neuroimmunology Laboratory as a new basic science lab within the Department of Symptom Research. The lab extends the department's ongoing descriptive research and intervention trials in patients with research based on animal models of pain, fatigue, neuropathy and cognitive impairment.