skip to content

Department of Pharmacology

 

Department of Pharmacology Seminar Series

Seminars will be held as usual in the Departmental Seminar Room at 12:30pm on Fridays in Full Term. After the talk there will be tea and cake and a chance to talk informally with the speaker.

If anyone wishes to have some time with any speaker before the talk, please contact in advance.

If you would like to see previous talks, or to access previous recordings, please click here. You can also access our YouTube playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe8pAmQe8MdGWxOJlmff94P0J0rTn0LEK

Schedule for Lent 2024

Refreshments and snacks will be provided for all in-person talks, after the conclusion of each talk. This will be held in the breakout space.

Friday 26th January, 4 pm - 5 pm

Why it’s important to think about equity, diversity and inclusion when designing, running, analysing and reporting clinical trials

Professor Shaun Treweek

University of Aberdeen, Health Services Research

Online only

Biography

Shaun is a health services researcher interested in efficient trial design, particularly around inclusive recruitment and retention and the effective presentation of research evidence. He led the development of the NIHR INCLUDE Ethnicity Framework, a tool to help trialists design inclusive trials and PRECIS-2, a tool to match trial design decisions to what the users of the results need. 

He leads an initiative called Trial Forge (http://www.trialforge.org) that aims to be more systematic about how we identify, generate and use research evidence in making trial design, conduct, analysis and reporting decisions.  In 2019 Trial Forge won the international Cochrane-REWARD Prize for outstanding work in reducing waste in research.  Finally, Shaun is an Editor-in-Chief of the journal Trials.

Venue: Zoom

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83434713412?pwd=R2pDRStEVStmblREeHdzNGFicXcy...

Meeting ID: 834 3471 3412
Passcode: 585571

 

Friday 2nd February, 4 pm - 5 pm

Biophysical methods in small molecule drug discovery

Dr Stanislava Panova

Astex Pharmaceuticals, Senior Research Associate

Biography

Stanislava Panova, PhD, is a senior research associate in the Molecular Sciences group at Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge UK. She has studied biophysics in Lomonosov Moscow State University, where she has first been introduced to biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. She has earned her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2017 in the group of Prof Jon Waltho, her research delved into applying NMR spectroscopy methods to study inter and intramolecular interactions in proteins, intrinsically disordered proteins in particular. Transitioning to Astex in 2018, Dr. Panova assumed the role of a research associate, contributing her expertise to support early-stage drug discovery initiatives by applying biophysical methods. Currently her work focuses on optimizing the integration of NMR methods into the drug discovery pipeline.


Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81545010900?pwd=NnNmWmQ0OVV5WTRxL1hhSUxNd2Zz...

Meeting ID: 815 4501 0900
Passcode: 200209

 

Friday 9th February, 4 pm - 5 pm

Not just an affair of the heart: A look at ERG channels and Kv7 channels in smooth muscle

Professor Iain Greenwood

St George’s University, Department of Life and Environmental Science

Biography

Professor Iain Greenwood joined St George's, University of London in 1993 as a postdoctoral researcher. He has held a variety of academic positions here since then and became Professor of Vascular Pharmacology in August 2013.

He is an adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences (Heart and Circulatory Research Section) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This appointment stems from a five-year collaboration with Professor Søren P Olesen looking at mechanisms involved with vascular disease.

Prof Greenwood obtained a First class Honours Degree in Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Hertfordshire in 1990. He then studied for a PhD at the University of Manchester in the Smooth Muscle Research Group, under the supervision of Professor AH Weston.   In 1998, he was awarded a prestigious four-year Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. This enabled him to spend four months working with Professor Normand Leblanc at the  Montreal Heart Institute, and one year working with Professor Burt Horowitz in the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology at the University of Nevada Medical School, Reno, USA.

Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/84556752610?pwd=bDlXNWhQUDArZjJyODZsZHkwa2RJ...

Meeting ID: 845 5675 2610
Passcode: 565725

 

Friday 16th February, 4 pm - 5 pm

StaRs™ and Structures – a door to the GPCR pharmacological and drug discovery universe

Dr Alastair Brown

Sosei Heptares, Translational Biosciences

Biography

Currently Senior Vice President of Translational Medicine at Sosei Heptares, a world leading GPCR biotech, responsible for delivering projects from hit identification through to clinical Phase2 development. Passionate about translating scientific pre-clinical laboratory data into early clinical studies to increase the probability of success of new medicines. With a background in molecular pharmacology Alastair has over 20years experience in the pharmaceutical industry in both large and small companies delivering multiple clinical drug candidates across neuroscience, inflammation, and oncology therapy areas.


Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87912324368?pwd=VTJJdXNzV0dUQVdRTHgxZGptMEtx...

Meeting ID: 879 1232 4368
Passcode: 772713

Friday 23rd February, 4 pm - 5 pm

David James Seminar: Molecular mechanisms regulating human weight regulation

Professor Sadaf Farooqi PhD, FRCP, FMedSci, FRS

University of Cambridge, Department of Clinical Biochemistry

Biography

Sadaf Farooqi is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an internationally leading Clinician Scientist who has made seminal contributions to understanding the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie obesity and its complications. The work of Sadaf Farooqi and her colleagues has fundamentally altered the understanding of how body weight is regulated. With colleagues, she discovered and characterised the first genetic disorders that cause severe childhood obesity and established that the principal driver of obesity in these conditions was a failure of the control of appetite. Her work is often cited as an exemplar of how the translation of research into the mechanisms of disease can lead to patient benefit. She has received a number of awards including the 2024 Outstanding Clinical Investigator Award from the Endocrine Society. In 2021, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of her exceptional contribution to science.


Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/88598536043?pwd=Wk1QcjhYUUtkMUJLK1lwRzBMSElG...

Meeting ID: 885 9853 6043
Passcode: 926404

 

Friday 1st March, 4 pm - 5 pm

A novel type of proteasome condensates that can target toxic protein aggregates

Dr Yu Ye

Imperial College London, Department of Brain Science

Biography

I completed my PhD training in David Komander's lab at MRC-LMB, where I combined structural biology with biophysical techniques to study molecular details of ubiquitin chains and deubiquitinases, and interactions that underlaid regulation of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS). Following this, I was fortunate to secure a stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at Selwyn College followed by a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellowship, to study the UPS with super-resolution imaging techniques. I worked between David Klenerman's group at Cambridge and Daniel Finley's group at Harvard to establish my own research direction, focusing on using the UPS to remove protein aggregates. Notably, we demonstrated that large fibrillar aggregates can be directly broken up by the 26S proteasome holoenzyme into small fragments in vitro in a ubiquitin-independent manner, defining a novel, fibril-fragmenting function of proteasomes (Cliffe et al., Cell Rep. 2019). During this time, I also served as a Fellow and Director of Studies in Natural Sciences at Selwyn. With a generous start-up package, I moved to Imperial College London to study the interplay between UPS and protein aggregation in neuronal models. Recently, my group developed a quantitative super-resolution imaging approach to measure the ability of pathological aggregates to penetrate cells, showing that proteasomes respond to proteotoxicity within hours, leading to aggregate removal (Morten et al., PNAS 2022). We are now expanding these findings to characterise mechanisms underlying this aggregate-induced proteasome response, which we think is driven by condensation of proteasomes and specific protein factors.

Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89654824601?pwd=QU9QNEVHVkJSR0dVeVZ4VmovV2Uy...

Meeting ID: 896 5482 4601
Passcode: 482026

Friday 8th March, 4 pm - 5 pm

PDRA Talks

Nuclear envelope integrity in health and disease

Dr Anne Janssen

University of Cambridge, Department of Pharmacology

Biography

Anne studied Biotechnology at Wageningen University. After finishing her Masters degree she started her PhD in the lab of Lukas Kapitein (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) working on the generation of inducible tools to study protein aggregation and degradation by the autophagy pathway. During her PhD work she got interested in the nuclear envelope which is why she joined the lab of Delphine Larrieu in 2019 to work on nuclear envelope integrity and premature aging diseases. Initially at CIMR, the lab moved to the department of Pharmacology in 2022. Currently, Anne works on an independent project for which she got a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to discover new players in nuclear envelope integrity maintenance. 

Dr Luke Pattison

A role for the proton-sensing GPCR, GPR65 in inflammatory joint pain

University of Cambridge, Department of Pharmacology

Biography

Luke studied Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Bath. During his undergraduate degree he undertook a placement at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Melbourne, Australia, where he studied the compartmentalised signalling of a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) implicated in inflammatory pain. Luke undertook his doctoral research in the Smith lab, submitting his thesis in 2021, which explored the contributions of proton-sensing GPCRs to inflammatory pain. Luke is continuing in the Smith lab as a postdoctoral researcher working on the Advanced Discovery of Visceral Analgesics via Neuroimmune Targets and the Genetics of Extreme human phenotypes (ADVANTAGE) consortium as part of the MRC Advanced Pain Discovery Platform.

Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89184640892?pwd=VnZXbEU4bDdtbkt5MEV2NWt0RUJt...

Meeting ID: 891 8464 0892
Passcode: 620598

 

Friday 15th March, 4 pm - 5 pm

Molecular insights into GABA-A receptor pharmacology

Dr Paul Miller

University of Cambridge, Department of Pharmacology

Biography

Paul did his PhD and a postdoc with Professor Trevor G Smart at University College London, where he applied electrophysiological and pharmacological approaches to link structure and function for, principally, glycine receptors. Subsequently, from 2010, Paul attained a Wellcome Trust OXION postdoctoral fellowship, in the Division of Structural Biology at University of Oxford, where he established methodologies for the production of membrane proteins within the department. Paul used these techniques to solve structures of GABAARs and for the production of antibodies with novel pharmacology and high selectivity. He joined the Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge as a lecturer in 2018 to advance antibody pharmacology of ion channels, and has received funding from AMS, BBSRC, Wellcome, Rosetrees Trust, and a range of industry support.

Venue: Level 2 Seminar Room.

Zoom Link:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86321175549?pwd=MnMxTWhub1ViUmhiYWJrSWQ0T25T...

Meeting ID: 863 2117 5549
Passcode: 168608