Department of Pharmacology Seminar Series
Seminars will be held as usual in the Departmental Seminar Room at 16:00 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 Professor Mark Howarth 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 2025
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. There will be no online streams this term.
Friday 31 January 16:00
Professor Geoff Woods
Principal Investigator, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
Human Pain Genetics
Biography
Professor Geoff Woods is a distinguished Professor of Human Genetics at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) and an honorary consultant in Clinical Genetics at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Specializing in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders of childhood, he also leads specialist clinics and a regional Clinical Genetics service. A graduate of the University of Birmingham, his career includes roles in the NHS and international institutions. Committed to medical education, Woods is a prolific researcher with an impressive H-index of 80, having published extensively in top journals. He is also an active member of medical societies and has received numerous awards for his contributions to genetics.
Monday 03 February 15:00
Professor Pieter Cullis
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of British Columbia
Lipid Nanoparticles that Enable the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and Gene Therapies
Biography
Dr. Cullis and co-workers have been responsible for fundamental advances in the development of nanomedicines employing lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology for cancer therapies, gene therapies and vaccines. This work has contributed to five drugs that have received clinical approval by the FDA, the European EMA and Health Canada. Dr. Cullis has also co-founded more than 10 biotechnology companies that now employ over 500 people, has published over 400 scientific articles (h index 140) and is an inventor on over 100 patents. He has also co-founded and been Founding Scientific Director of two National Centre of Excellence networks, the Centre for Drug Research and Development (now AdMare) in 2004 and the NanoMedicines Innovation Network in 2019. These not-for-profit networks are aimed at translating basic research in the life sciences into commercially viable products and have given rise to numerous start-up companies. Dr. Cullis also has a strong interest in personalized medicine, having published a book entitled “The Personalized Medicine Revolution: How Diagnosing and Treating Disease Are About to Change Forever” in 2015.
Two drugs enabled by LNP delivery systems devised by Dr. Cullis, members of his UBC laboratory and colleagues in the companies he has co-founded deserve special emphasis. The first is Onpattro which was approved by the US FDA in August 2018 to treat the previously fatal hereditary condition transthyretin-induced amyloidosis (hATTR). Onpattro is the first RNAi drug to receive regulatory approval. The second is Comirnaty, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech that has received regulatory approval in many jurisdictions including Canada, the USA, the UK and Europe. Comirnaty has played a major role in containing the global Covid-19 pandemic with approximately 6B doses administered worldwide in 2021 and 2022.
Dr. Cullis has received many awards including the Order of Canada in 2021, the VinFuture Prize (Vietnam), the Prince Mahidol Award (Thailand), the Gairdner International Award (Canada) and the Tang Prize (Taiwan) in 2022 and the Harvey Prize (Israel) and the Killam Prize (Canada) in 2023. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 2023 and elected to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2024.
Friday 14 February 16:00
Professor David Hughes
School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow
Developing More Effective Pharmacological Treatments for Chronic Pain
Biography
David is Professor of Neuroanatomy at the University of Glasgow, and one of six group leaders within the School of Psychology and Neuroscience’s Spinal Cord Group. He gained his BSc (Honours) in Anatomy at the University of Liverpool, and completed his PhD at the University of Wales, Cardiff, with his thesis on “Anatomical Evidence for Animo Acid Modulation of Cutaneous Sensory Afferents”. He then worked as a post-doctoral research assistant at University College London (Royal Free Hospital Campus) studying neuronal connectivity in the CA1 region of the hippocampus, before joining the University of Glasgow's Spinal Cord Group in 2000. David was appointed as a Lecturer of Anatomy in 2009, Senior Lecturer in 2014, and Professor in 2024.
The Hughes Laboratory use a combination of anatomical and electrophysiological approaches in both human and rodent tissue to identify individual neuronal populations and determine how their activity influences our ability to perceive different sensations. Our multidisciplinary studies to dissect and define modality-specific spinal cord circuits employ the use of viral vector labelling in transgenic mice, chemogenetics, optogenetics, behavioural assessments, confocal microscopy, and electron microscopy.
Friday 21 February 16:00
Dr Alecia-Jane Twigger
Cambridge Lactation Lab, University of Cambridge
Milk it! The Cambridge Lactation Lab Vision
Biography
Dr Twigger began her research career with a PhD in the Human Lactation Research Group at the University of Western Australia. Securing two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships back-to-back, she moved to Dr Christina Scheel’s laboratory at the Helmholtz Centre Munich, Germany to develop a milk cell derived mammary organoid model. In 2019, she was invited to join Walid Khaled’s laboratory at the Department of Pharmacology at UoC and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Here she focused on understanding differences in cell states of the mammary gland in normal (lactation) or abnormal (cancer) development using single cell protein and transcriptomic technologies. For the past 3 years, she has collaborated with a large interdisciplinary team lead by Prof Greg Hannon (CRUK-CI) and Jean Abraham (Breast Unit Addenbrookes) on a Wellcome LEAP funded project to determine the molecular mechanisms of triple negative breast cancer patient response to chemotherapy. Recently, she secured the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to start her own research group, the Cambridge Lactation Lab. The focus of the lab’s ongoing research programme is to develop models of human lactation to untangle the biosynthesis of milk to support breastfeeding and long-term health of mothers and infants.
Friday 28 February 16:00
Pharmacology Postdoctoral Talks
Dr Lay Ping Ong
Dr Federico Bosetto
Aptamers as therapeutic tools against resistant bacteria
Biography
Federico Bosetto graduated in Biological Sciences and in Molecular and Cellular Biology, both at the University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy). In 2021, he got his PhD degree in Agricultural Science and Biotechnology at the University of Udine, Udine (Italy), submitting a PhD thesis on “Development of synthetic methods, namely oligonucleotide aptamers, in order to stimulate the plant defense response in Arabidopsis thaliana”. In 2020, he performed a PhD visiting period at Istitut Pasteur of Paris (France) at Bioorganic chemistry of nucleic acids group. After the PhD, in 2021, he joint Pure Biologics (Wrocław, Poland) as R&D Scientist at Aptamers group, working on the development of chemically modified DNA aptamers for therapeutic purposes for human diseases. In 2023, he joint the University of Cambridge as Research Associate in Mela lab, working on the development of DNA aptamers in the field of the antibiotic resistance.
Title to be confirmed
Wednesday 5 March 15:00
David James Talk: Dr Feng Zhang
Exploration of Biological Diversity
Biography
Dr. Zhang is a molecular biologist focused on improving human health. He played an integral role in the development of two revolutionary technologies, optogenetics and CRISPR-Cas systems, including pioneering the use of Cas9 for genome editing and discovering CRISPR-Cas12 and Cas13 systems and developing them for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Current research in the Zhang laboratory is centered on the discovery of novel biological systems and processes, uncovering their mechanisms, and developing them into molecular tools and therapies to study and treat human disease. Zhang is a core member of the Broad Institute, an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a fellow in the National Academy of Inventors.
Friday 7 March 16:00
Dr Florian Merkle
Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge
Drug Discovery, Action, and Repurposing in iPSC-derived Neurons
Biography
The Merkle lab studies rare human brain cell populations that regulate hunger, and whose activity is related to obesity and diabetes. Specifically, they differentiate human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into hypothalamic POMC neurons that suppress appetite, and then characterize how they respond to existing anti-obesity drugs such as semaglutide/Ozempic, as well as using them to discover novel therapeutic strategies. In the past years, we have developed scalable methods to measure the functional activity of POMC neurons using calcium imaging on high-content confocal microscopes, and by measuring their secretion of the appetite-suppressing neuropeptide MSH in a high-throughput assay. We look forward to harnessing these models with our colleagues in Pharmacology as our work moves increasingly toward therapeutic translation.
Friday 14 March 16:00
Dr Maria Maiarú
Reading School of Pharmacy, University of Reading
Title to be confirmed
Biography
Friday 21 March 16:00
Dr James Reading
Principal Investigator, University College London
Title to be confirmed
Biography
James completed his PhD and initial postdoctoral training at King's College London and in industry studying T cell immunology in the context of HIV-1 infection, autoimmunity and transplantation under the mentorship of Prof Timothy Tree. He then joined the laboratory of Prof Sergio Quezada at UCL to work on neoantigen-specific T cell differentiation as part of the TRACERx, study led by Prof Charles Swanton.
James is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. co-leads the Immunology theme in the Cancer Resarch UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellencem sits on the steering committee for the UK Therapeutic Cancer Prevention Network and is a founding member of the WAMS program at UCL which promotes access to STEM for students in underserved London boroughs.