Abstract

Friday 23 January, 13:00 – 14:00

Speaker: Professor Meritxell Canals Buj

Talk Title: Pharmacology, signalling and regulation of the mu-opioid receptor

Biography: Meritxell Canals joined the University of Nottingham in October 2018 as a Professor of Cellular Pharmacology at the School of Life Sciences. Her research interests focus on understanding the interactions between G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) and intracellular proteins, and their consequences for receptor signalling and trafficking.

Meritxell did her PhD in biochemistry at the University of Barcelona, Spain and at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Her PhD was part of a EU-funded multidisciplinary project that examined the interactions between adenosine and dopamine receptors in Parkinson’s Disease. During her PhD, Meritxell obtained scholarships to visit the laboratories of Prof M Bouvier (pioneer in the application of BRET to GPC Rs; Montreal, Canada) and Prof R Pepperkok (a leader in the development of FRET ; EMBL, Germany). Dr Canals completed postdoctoral training in a series of leading pharmacology groups. In the laboratory of Prof G Milligan in Glasgow, (2005-2008) she focused on the functional consequences of GPCR co-expression and oligomerisation for which she developed novel RET techniques. As a senior post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Profs R Leurs and M Smit in Amsterdam (2008-2010) she focused on the regulation, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry of chemokine receptors. In 2010, Meritxell was awarded a Monash Fellowship to start her independent line of research within the Drug Discovery Biology (DDB) Theme at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS). In 2017 she took a sabbatical year to work with her collaborators in the departments of surgery (Prof N Bunnett) and pharmacology (Prof J Javitch) at Columbia University, New York. At the end of 2018, Meritxell moved to the University of Nottingham, to join the Centre of Membrane Protein and Receptors, (COMPARE) a joined venture between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham.