Dr. GPCR Podcast

Dr. Kari Johnson is currently an assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a neuropharmacologist with an interest in the long-term effects of alcohol abuse on neural circuits. Kari completed her Ph.D. in Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University before continuing her training as a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery,  the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. All through her career, the recurring theme in Kari’s work has been GPCRs and more specifically Metabotropic Glutamate Receptors. Join me and learn more about how Kari studies GPCRs in basal ganglia circuits following chronic alcohol exposure in mice.

Dr. Maria Waldhoer is originally from Austria. She earned her M.Sc. in Zoology and Neurobiology before completing a Ph.D. in Biology and Pharmacology at the University of Vienna. GPCRs led Maria to Thue W. Schwartz’s lab in Copenhagen where she completed her postdoctoral training. After working in the US and at the University in Graz in Austria, Maria worked several years at Novo Nordisk before joining InterAx Biotech in Switzerland as their Chief Scientific Officer. Even though Maria stumbled upon the GPCR field, her 20 years in both academia and in the industry working on GPCRs make her a strong and dedicated scientific leader.

Dr. Pluznick discovered that olfactory receptors in mice are also expressed in their kidneys and blood vessels. Her research is focused on the role of chemosensory GPCRs in regulating renal and cardiovascular function, and identifying renal/cardiovascular olfactory receptor ligands, and relating them to whole-animal physiology. This work contributes to a better understanding of how the kidney helps maintain homeostasis in humans.

Jennifer is currently an assistant professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degree in biology from Truman State University and earned her Ph.D. in renal physiology from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She then spent five years training as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Michael Caplan at Yale University, where she studied both renal physiology and sensory biology systems and focused on olfaction.

Fiona Marshall got fascinated with GPCRs after attending a lecture on how the beta-adrenergic receptor in the heart is activated by adrenaline, during her undergraduate studies at Bath University. She then pursued her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Cambridge University. An expert in GPCR biology, Fiona published the first description of the cloning and structural requirements of the GABAB receptor. One of her career path defining moments came from when she visited Dr. Chris Tate and Dr. Richard Henderson at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. As a co-founder of Heptares Therapeutics, now called Sosei Heptares, a GPCR focused drug discovery and development biotechnology company, Fiona and her team made considerable breakthroughs in the field of GPCR stabilization and structure-based drug design. Today, Dr. Marshall is the VP Head of Neuroscience Discovery and Head of Discovery UK, Global Head of Neuroscience discovery research leading teams in West Point, Boston, and London at MSD. Join me and learn more about her fascinating career trajectory.

Listen to this fantastic round table discussion that I had the privilege to moderate with Alexander Hauser. Our guests were Maria Waldhoer, Tudor I. Oprea , Thomas Sakmar, Aurelien Rizk & Yaroslav Nikolaev.

The explosion of biomedical data such as in genomics, structural biology, and pharmacology can provide new opportunities to improve our understanding of human physiology and disease. In recent years, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods have received a significant boost of attention. ML/AI can be powerful for identifying abstract patterns within large data where traditional methods would be oblivious to. This comes without the need for manual feature engineering as systems can learn through implicit rules from the data provided. G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) mediate a vast variety of critical biological processes and provide an ideal case study for quantitative, and multi‐scale integration of these amounts of data to gain novel insights into receptor biology. How can we best leverage these exciting new techniques in areas such as protein structure prediction, bioactive ligand discovery, in vivo translationability or in our understanding of signalling determinants? Here, we would like to discuss opportunities, weaknesses, and advantages of these new technologies, which may contribute to probe our favorite targets at all scales.4- Banner photo:

GPCRs have played a central role in my scientific career ever since I took Dr. Michel Bouvier’s class as an undergraduate student at the University of Montreal in early 2000. During the past 2 decades, my research mainly focused on chemokine receptor structure/function relationships. For the purposes of this presentation, I will walk you through my various career experiences and include the skills I learned during each experience, which ultimately led me to found Dr.GPCR. Last, I will give an overview of the various programs we established at DR.GPCR, present our team as well as provide you with a sneak peek of our future podcast guests and more.

In this episode of the Dr. GPCR Podcast, I spoke to Dr. Aaron Sato from Twist Biopharma, a vertical within Twist Bioscience. Aaron is currently the Chief Scientific Officer and VP of Protein Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied MHC class II structure-function relationships. His path led him to work in an industry where he assumed various responsibilities and roles in the antibody space. Aaron has a proven track record as a biologics leader as he led teams to discover and develop novel first-in-class antibody therapeutics. Dr. Sato published over 30 peer-reviewed papers and contributed to 40 issued patents in the antibody space.

During our time together, Aaron and I discussed how using Twist Bioscience’s proprietary technology to manufacture DNA at a scale, the team saw an opportunity to tackle the challenge of identifying novel functional antibodies targeting GPCRs by incorporating these natural binding partners into Twist’s antibody library design.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to Twist Biopharma for sponsoring this episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast.

In this episode of the Dr.GPCR podcast, my guest is Dr. Arun Shukla from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. Arun is currently an Associate Professor & Joy Gill Chair Professor, Intermediate Fellow, Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance

Swarnajayanti Fellow & EMBO Young Investigator at the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. He earned his master's degree in biotechnology from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and it was during a biochemistry class where he learned about cell signaling that he became curious and wanted to learn more about it. Arun first started working on GPCRs and their structural characterization at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics where he completed his doctoral studies in the lab of Dr. Hartmut Michel.

Fascinated by GPCRs he wrote to Dr. Bob Lefkowitz and asked him if he could join his lab at Duke University. Dr. Shukla spent several years in the Lefkowitz lab and collaborated extensively with Dr. Brian Kolbika of Stanford University.

Join us and learn more about Dr. Shukla’s research and how working in the lab instead of going to classes made him realize that research is what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

Dr. Bryan Roth is the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine. After receiving his MD and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from St. Louis University in 1983, he subsequently trained in pharmacology (NIH), molecular biology, and psychiatry at Stanford. Bryan leads a $26.9 Million project to create better psychiatric medications among other things.

But, it wasn’t always this way. Bryan got fascinated with receptors after attending the lecture of a visiting professor on neurotransmission while in college in Montana, where he is from. He was determined to work on psychiatric disorders and persevered even when he was told several times he would never make it as a basic scientist and that he would never publish anything important. Join me and learn more about Bryan and his work.

In this episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast, we meet with Dr. Amynah Pradhan. She is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Amynah did her undergrad research measuring IP3 in airway smooth muscle cells and completed a Ph.D. at McGill University in Canada with Dr. Paul Clarck where she studied opioid receptors. Her next career step took her to AstraZeneca as a postdoctoral trainee where she studies animal models of pain and sensory neuron sensitive-receptor. She then moved back to academia and worked on opioids as a postdoctoral trainee with Dr. Brigitte Kieffer where she studied ligand directed signaling at the delta-opioid receptor. Her career path defining moment came from a third postdoctoral experience with Dr.Chris Evans at UCLA. Amynah studied how arrestins regulate ligand directed signaling at delta-opioid receptors and it is the collaboration with a headache physician-scientist Dr. Andrew Charles that she specialized in animal models of migraine and delta-opioid receptors as a therapeutic target to treat a headache.