Dr. Thomas J Schnitzer MD, PhD

Thomas Schnitzer, MD, PhD received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, followed by a residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He then spent time at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, and further clinical and research training at the MRC Rheumatism Unit in Taplow, England at the Imperial Cancer Research Institute in London, England, where he received his Ph.D. He had faculty appointments at the University of Michigan Medical School and Rush Medical College before coming to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 1997.

Dr. Schnitzer has had long-standing interests in understanding osteoarthritis and pain. His early research focused on factors responsible for progression of cartilage damage and bone changes in osteoarthritis. This work led to interventional studies assessing how to ameliorate these changes and reduce the symptoms of osteoarthritis.

Since coming to Northwestern, Dr. Schnitzer has worked in collaboration with the Apkarian Lab to understand the mechanisms responsible for the development and maintenance of chronic pain. These studies have been fruitful, resulting in numerous publications and funding from federal (NIH, DOD) and non-federal sources (foundations, pharma). In addition, Dr. Schnitzer has been the principal investigator in a wide-range of studies of new therapeutic approaches to treat chronic pain, including osteoarthritis, low back pain and neuropathic pain. These studies have focused largely on new compounds developed by pharmaceutical companies and now being tested in phase 2 or phase 3 clinical trials. Other studies have examined disease modifying agents in osteoarthritis and treatments to prevent the rapid bone loss seen after spinal cord injury.