COMPARE Appointments 

COMPARE (Centre of Membrane and Protein Receptors) is pleased to announce the following appointments

Prof Dmitry Veprintsev as Professor of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Nottingham. Dmitry will provide leadership in molecular and cellular pharmacology with a particular emphasis on structural approaches to study cell surface receptor activation and signalling.

Dmitry did his PhD in biophysics and protein folding at the Russian Academy of Sciences and at the Ohio State University, USA. In 1999, he joined Sir Alan Fersht at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering and later at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, first as a Human Frontier postdoctoral fellow and later as a staff scientist. There he focused on the structural and biophysical characterisation of the tumour suppressor p53 and on the development of chemical chaperone strategy to rescue destabilised cancer-associated mutants of p53. In 2010 he became a group leader at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland where focused his research on the role of protein dynamics in signalling by G protein coupled receptors.

dmitry.veprintsev@nottingham.ac.uk
0115 82 30671

Dr Meri Canals, will join COMPARE in October 2018 as COMPARE Chair and Professor of Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Nottingham.

Meri obtained her PhD in 2004 from the University of Barcelona as part of an EU-funded project that examined the interactions between adenosine and dopamine receptors in Parkinson’s Disease. In 2010, she was awarded a Monash Fellowship to start her independent research career within the Drug Discovery Biology (DDB) Theme at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) in Melbourne. Since then, her research has focused on understanding the interactions between GPCRs and intracellular proteins, and their consequences for receptor signalling and trafficking.

The primary focus of her laboratory is the pharmacology and cell biology of GPCRs involved in nociception and pain transmission. She has a particular interest on the opioid and neurokinin (NK1R) receptors, which not only represent exemplar GPCRs with extensive pharmacological tools, but are also major therapeutic targets for the treatment of acute and chronic pain. The use of drugs targeting these receptors is still limited by the development of adverse side effects (such as respiratory depression or opioid tolerance, which requires dose escalations to obtain the same analgesic effect) or, in the case of NK1R antagonists, lack of analgesic efficacy. Her vision is that understanding the implications of such receptor positional and conformational dynamism will provide a path for improved GPCR drug discovery, and in particular lead to more effective and safer pain management therapeutics. She is also investigating the structural determinants of signalling at the chemokine receptor CCR2, an important target for atherosclerosis, diabetes and cancer.

Dr Robert Lane, will also join us in October 2018 as COMPARE Fellow and Assistant Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the University of Nottingham.

Rob obtained his PhD (2007) at the University of Glasgow supervised by Prof Graeme Milligan. The main focus of his thesis was the signalling characteristics of dopamine receptors, members of the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) family, and included one of the first studies of biased agonism. In 2010, he was awarded a VENI fellowship (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) and Larkin’s fellowship (Monash University) to begin his career as an independent researcher within the Drug Discovery Biology Theme at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, in Melbourne.

His current research focuses on understanding how different drugs bind to GPCRs and how this dictates their functional effects, as the basis for the development of more effective therapeutics. He has a particular interest in GPCRs known to be targets for the treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders, such as the dopamine receptors. His lab’s recent work has revealed that clinically relevant antipsychotics are biased agonists and that drug binding and signalling kinetics have a profound influence on this bias. He is also exploring the action of first-in-class negative and positive allosteric modulators of the dopamine receptors that may represent a novel approach to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. While the study of the dopamine receptors is the primary focus of his research. He is exploring similar concepts at other GPCRs including the muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, opioid receptors, chemokine receptors and adrenergic receptors. In 2017 he was awarded a Schaefer Scholarship to join the departments of Psychiatry & Pharmacology at Columbia University (New York, USA) as an Assistant Professor for a sabbatical year, hosted by Prof Jonathan Javitch. Here, he is developing selective pharmacological tools with which to interrogate dopamine receptor signalling in vivo.