NEW YORK – Dr. Theodora Dorina Papageorgiou, assistant professor of neurology and physical medicine and rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, always wanted to go into science, she told The National Herald on a recent visit to TNH’s offices in Long Island City. Born and raised in Athens, she now calls Houston home where she lives with her husband, attorney James Cargas, who recently ran for Congress.
He was praised for his campaign by Republicans and Democrats alike for sticking to the issues, though the voters chose another Democrat to move on in the primary. His wife, supportive throughout, is working on some of the most cutting-edge research in neurology. She recently received a grant from the McNair Medical Institute to continue her work focused on investigational targeted brain neuro-therapeutics, including the rehabilitation of visual cortical blindness, speech/motor impairment and chronic pain as a result of traumatic brain injury, stroke, brain tumor, neurodegenerative disease, and pain syndromes.
Dr. Papageorgiou told TNH about this remarkable work which will undoubtedly change the way many patients are treated for a variety of injuries, disorders, and diseases. Her interest in science and medicine began early on. Her father, Dr. George Papageorgiou, is a physician with three specialties and a PhD, as well. She credits her parents for instilling the passion for education and science in her and her sister, Dr. Angela Papageorgiou, who is a cancer biologist doing pancreatic cancer research at Harvard. Their mother, Olga, studied English literature in England and taught them the English alphabet before they started school. Her parents met at the Red Cross Hospital in Athens where her father was a physician and her mother was a volunteer.
After passing the Greek exams, Papageorgiou said her mother asked if she wanted to study in the United States and she said yes. Accepted to the University of Georgia, she studied psychology and sociology, and then attended Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health earning her master’s in psychiatric epidemiology. Her sister also attended the University of Georgia and went onto earn her PhD at MD Cancer Center. Papageorgiou visited her sister there and was really impressed with the Texas Medical Center. “It’s an amazing place in terms of medicine and science,” she told TNH, “So I went there to the graduate school with a focus on neuroscience, and got my PhD degree in human brain neuroimaging.”
Three fellowships followed, one at MD Anderson, two at Baylor, and a joint appointment at Baylor and Rice University in the engineering department there. Papageorgiou said of Houston, “It’s very diverse, the Texas Medical Center is extremely diverse with people from all over the world.”
About the focus of her research she explained, “Human brain neuroimaging, so we all know what an MRI is, it looks at the structures of the brain, fMRI looks at not only the structures but also the function of the brain, functional MRI, but what we’re doing in my lab very few people in the world are doing this. It’s called real time functional MRI neurofeedback (rt-fMRI). So in real time we read the activity in the patient’s brain and we feed it back to re-circuit the brain, but what my lab is doing is very individualized and targeted treatment, potentially treatment, we hope, for patients who have neurological disorders, specifically people who have cortical blindness, so the blindness is not the result of a retinal problem but rather of a lesion in the brain at the location of the brain responsible for vision as the result of a stroke or traumatic brain injury or tumor resection… Using this technology, we capitalize on areas in the brain that are functionally associated with a lesion area but they’re intact, that give us the ability to reorganize pathways which is feasible because there is a lot of redundancy in the brain, a lot of copies so under specific, targeted, and individualized training, we’re finding that we can accomplish this for these types of patients restore visual recovery.”
Papageorgiou also noted that another patient population “we are also looking at people with lower cranial nerve injury, so basically the nerves that control tongue movement are lesioned which has terrible complications because they cannot swallow, they cannot eat, they have speech problems, and so we’re using the same principle to reorganize pathways and try to capitalize on those that maybe have some function still and also in the pain area we are starting a new study on patients who have as a result of cancer treatment, have neuropathic pain and that lingers even after treatment so we want to map the brain to see what happens at the brain level after this treatment they receive and how can we eliminate pain using again the same technology. The lab has a development component, we’re developing the technology and, at the same time, we’re applying it to patients and also we’re looking at healthy people to better understand these pathways and optimize our approach to patients.”
She added that “this method is completely non-invasive, the same way someone lays supine in the MRI scanner, it’s the same thing but they have to engage doing a task.”
“Somebody may wonder if these people are partially blind how can they see, but apparently the brain receives some messages and after a while there is this learning that occurs,” Papageorgiou said.
As the patient performs the task, repeatedly, data is being collected in real time and precise calculations are being made. The results for some patients who return for treatments over time to maintain and improve their outcomes can be life-changing. Papageorgiou noted that this treatment is “not one size fits all, it’s individualized and targeted.”
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