Graduate Research Seminar

On Monday 16 May Amanada Kennedy (PhD in Clinical Pharamcology ) will give the final Graduate Research Seminar of the year with a talk entitled "GPCRs: Novel ways to approach drug discovery using these highly druggable, complex machines"

Seven million British people suffer from cardiovascular disease, which causes one death every 3 minutes in the UK, but there is still no cure. G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), signal transducers that process extracellular stimuli to initiate an intracellular response, have been targeted by medicines since ancient Egyptian times, and are currently targeted by 40% of all modern medicines. Located on the cell membrane, GPCRs are very accessible to drug molecules; they are hugely diverse, given their ability to process an extensive range of extracellular stimuli, and activate numerous intracellular signalling pathways. They are also linked to many diseases. GPCRs are important drug targets, two of the key classes of drugs presently available to treat hypertension target GPCRs, the β-blockers and the Angiotensin II receptor antagonists. However, cardiovascular disease, for which hypertension is a major risk factor, still kills 425 people every day in the UK. It is therefore essential to continue the development of novel medicines to combat the UK’s biggest killer. The obvious GPCRs to target have been found and have been hugely successful for the last 40 years; it is now necessary to change how we approach this highly druggable family. This talk will look towards understanding these complex machines further, specifically at orphan receptors and biased signalling as novel ways to find future medicinal therapies. I will use examples from my PhD to discuss the ideas and convince you that GPCRs are not only drug targets of the past, but will also be drug targets of the future.

The graduate research seminar provides an opportunity for our graduate students and research fellows to discuss their work before an astute and very friendly audience. Because this mixed audience includes not only expert insiders, but also intelligent and interested outsiders, this is also an opportunity for speakers to hone their communicative skills, and for the rest of us to be exposed to unfamiliar problems, methodologies and theories.

Meetings begin at 12:45 in the Senior Combination Room, where a free buffet lunch is provided. The speakers kick off at 1:00, and finish by 1:30, giving us a quarter of an hour for questions and discussion.