Please see below items about new honours for BCN staff, and the Sandrine Thuret, Sarah Marzi, Alessio Delogu, Verity McClelland, Antonio Valentin, Sarah Mizielenska, Emma Clayton and Peter Giese lab groups. Also updates from the mTOR Pathway Diseases rare disease node, details of the UK MND Research Institute newsletter sign up, UKDRI news and upcoming workshops from the WCIC.
New Honours for BCN staff
Members of staff from King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have been recognised in the 2025 New Year Honours List. An OBE has been awarded to Prof Al-Sarraj – director of the Brain Bank – and MBE for Prof Keyoumars Ashkan (both hold honorary professorships within the department).
New Year Honours for King’s staff | King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Verity McClelland’s lab have had the following paper accepted for publication in Transactions in Biomedical Engineering.
Stationary and Sparse Denoising Approach for Corticomuscular Causality Estimation Authors: Farwa Abbas, Verity McClelland, Zoran Cvetkovic, and Wei Dai
News from the Thuret lab
Congratulations to Vikki Houghton for leading on a new paper from the Thuret and Santos Labs and collaborators exploring Neuro-Immune Interactions in Food Allergy published in December 2024 issue of Allergy.
Vikki takes a very innovative angle on behavioural and neurological changes associated with food allergy and potential mediation via cytokines and postnatal hippocampal neurogenesis https://doi.org/10.1111/all.16366
The Sarah Marzi lab group has published a new paper in Nucleic Acids Research:
https://academic.oup.com/nar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nar/gkae1212/7921050?searchresult=1
Predicting gene expression from histone marks using chromatin deep learning models depends on histone mark function, regulatory distance and cellular states
Alan E Murphy, Aydan Askarova, Boris Lenhard, Nathan G Skene, Sarah J Marzi
Alessio Delogu and Peter Giese have been awarded funding of £200,000 over 4 years by the Peter Samuel Charitable Trust to investigate molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease.
News from the Valentin Lab
The Antonio Valentin lab have received the news that we have an accepted article in Nature Communications based on international research regarding DBS and epilepsy:
A generalized epilepsy network derived from brain abnormalities and deep brain stimulation
Authors: Gong-Jun Ji, Michael D. Fox, Mae Morton-Dutton, Yingru Wang, Jinmei Sun, Panpan Hu, Xingui Chen, Yubao Jiang, Chunyan Zhu, Yanghua Tian, Zhiqiang Zhang, Haya Akkad, Janne Nordberg, Juho Joutsai, Cristina V. Torres Diaz, Sergiu Gropp, Gabriel Gonzalez-Escamilla, Maria de Toledo, Linda J. Dalic, John S. Archer, Richard Selway, Ioannis Stavropoulos, Antonio Valentin, Jimmy Yang, Faical Isbainex, Robert E. Gross, Sihyeong Park, Nicholas M. Gregg, Arthur Cukiert, Erik H. Middlebrooks, Nico U.F. Dosenbach, Joseph Turner, Aaron E.L. Warren, Melissa M.J. Chu, Alexander L. Cohen, Sara Larivière, Clemens Neudorfer, Andreas Horn, Rani A. Sarkis, Ellen J. Bubrick, Robert S. Fisher, John D. Rolston, Kai Wang, and Frederic L.W.V.J. Schaper.
News from the Clayton/Mizielinska labs
Dr. Afra Aabdien (above) has been awarded The Wellcome Trust Accelerator Award to fund a two-year research project entitled “Investigating the Molecular Mechanisms of RNA Binding Protein ARPP21 in ALS.” This project seeks to elucidate the early pathological mechanisms triggered by mutant ARPP21 and to advance the understanding of novel ARPP21 granule dynamics in human iPSC-derived neurons.
Livvy Houghton has successfully submitted her PhD thesis.
Sara Tacconelli(Mizielinska & Ruepp lab) successfully passed her viva for her thesis supervised by Caroline Vance.
Rebecca Casterton has been awarded 2 competitive fellowships by University of Cape Town, South Africa. She has been awarded a University Research Committee Fellowship and a Faculty of Health Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship. She will relocate to UCT in summer 2025 to begin work investigating neuronal cell cycle re-entry as a novel mechanism implicated in C9ORF72 ALS/FTD pathology.
Dan Solomon and Livvy Houghton presented their respective work at the MNDA 35th International Symposium on MND in Montreal, Canada.
News from the Giese Lab
K. Ulli Bayer and K. Peter Giese have published a perspective in Nature Neuroscience entitled A revised view on the role of CaMKII in learning and memory: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01809-x
Considering experimental evidence over the last 25 years, we argue that the autophosphorylation of CaMKII at threonine-286 is not a mechanism of memory storage, as long believed, but it rather mediates the induction of several distinct synaptic plasticities.
News from the mTOR Pathway Diseases rare disease node who held a successful PPIE workshop for partnering mTOR pathway diseases patient organisations at the Strand campus on the 5th December.
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News from the UKDRI
AviadoBio Ltd, a spin-out company co-founded by UK DRI at King’s researcher Professor Chris Shaw have announced an exclusive option and license agreement with Astellas Pharma Inc. for AVB-101, a gene therapy in Phase 1/2 development for patients with frontotemporal dementia with progranulin mutations (FTD-GRN).
Please see links below for further information on UKDRI.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/aviadobio-astella-gene-therapy-avb-101-frontotemporal-dementia
https://www.astellas.com/en/news/29501