WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Peter Czabotar
 

Matthew E Call, PhD
veski Innovation Fellow, WEHI Professor of Medical Biology; Laboratory Head – Structural Biology division, WEHI

Understanding and exploiting transmembrane receptor architecture

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session
 

Cell-surface receptors control the development and key functions of blood cells. Gain-of-function mutations in receptors and downstream signalling pathways can cause overproduction of blood cells, leading to cancers and other proliferative diseases, while loss-of-function mutations can result in anaemia, bleeding disorders and immune deficiencies. Understanding how the structural features of these receptors control their functions is crucial for developing strategies to manipulate or reengineer their activities for therapeutic benefit.

In this seminar, Matt will describe two current areas of research in the lab that illustrate how the lessons derived from receptor structure-function studies can contribute to cancer diagnosis and treatment. The first half of the seminar will show how a mutagenesis screen that identified new oncogenic mutations in the thrombopoietin receptor (TpoR/MPL) has been repurposed to discover fundamental differences between natural and synthetic TpoR agonist signalling. In the second half, Matt will describe how a set of de novo designed transmembrane sequences that were developed to study the role of oligomeric state (the number of copies that make a structural unit) in receptor activation are contributing to improved T cell-based cancer immunotherapies.

Matt completed his PhD in immunology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School and then pursued postdoctoral training in protein biophysics (NMR spectroscopy), also at Harvard Medical School. He joined WEHI as a Laboratory Head in the Structural Biology Division in 2010, where he leads a research group jointly with Melissa Call.

All welcome!