WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Ken Smith
 

Professor Vihandha Wickramasinghe

Laboratory Head – Genetics and Gene Regulation division, WEHI

Uncovering mechanisms of nuclear RNA transport – from fundamental biology to commercialisation

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session
 

Professor Vihandha (Vi) Wickramasinghe’s research interests lie in understanding the molecular basis of how RNA is selectively processed and exported from the nucleus into the cytoplasm and how deregulation of these processes contributes to human cancer. He will present recent fundamental work on the discovery of new pathways that regulate the nuclear export of an emerging class of RNAs, circular RNA. He will also present recent work uncovering how nuclear export is regulated during cellular stress and how nuclear domains play an important role. He will also discuss efforts to develop first-in-class inhibitors of mRNA export to treat cancer and how these chemical tools can reveal how mRNAs are transported within the nucleus.

Vi Wickramasinghe was awarded a prestigious Melbourne National Scholarship to undertake his undergraduate and honours degrees in Biomedical Science at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Following this, he was awarded a Medical Research Council pre-doctoral fellowship to undertake his PhD studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom under Professor Ron Laskey, FRS, CBE, FMedSci, and undertook further postdoctoral work with Professor Laskey and Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, FMedSci (2003-2016). He was recruited back to Australia on a veski Innovation Fellowship in 2016 to start his laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. His laboratory moved to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, in November 2024. He is the inaugural Moderna Australia Fellow, and has recently spun out a company, exteRNA to further develop first in-class inhibitors of mRNA export to treat cancer.

All welcome!