Professor of Neuroscience
School of Medicine and Public Health | Department of Neuroscience
Hometown: Hitchin, England
My lab researches large scale gene changes that occur in the brain during disease. We mine that data to find point of intervention to reverse the course of disease. Currently we are using this approach to reverse brain changes that occur in the epileptic brain, a condition afflicting 1% of the population.
In-person talks only preferred.
Talks:
Quenching a brain on fire: finding a cure for epilepsy
Epilepsy is the 4th most common brain disorder, affecting 1 in 26 people. Though there are drugs to treat seizures, no drugs target the disease itself. By using advanced gene analysis tools that mine ‘big data’, we’ve found two key ‘master controllers’ of genes in the brain that battle to control the epileptic state. One of these, STAT3, tries to activate a harmful inflammatory pathway in the brain whereas the other, EZH2, attempts turn it off. We devised a strategy to help EZH2 shut down its target pathways using a drug, CP690550, which also targets the JAK/STAT pathway. Excitingly, this drug nearly stopped all seizure activity in test rodents. From multiple experiments, we’ve seen that EZH2 defends against the worsening of epilepsy, and with the help of drugs like CP690550, we could potentially treat the disease more effectively. We are confident that CP690550 may target the disease itself – a goal that has eluded researchers for centuries.