Stuart Galloway & Naomi Brooks
University of Stirling, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.91.14

20 February 2013, University of Stirling, Scotland

This year, The Physiological Society awarded the GL Brown Prize to Anant Parekh, University of Oxford. Parekh has had a glittering career to date starting with his acceptance into University College, Oxford to study medicine followed by a doctorate from the same institution. He then moved to begin an Alexander Von Humboldt Scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, before obtaining a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship and then a Sir Edward Abraham Research Fellowship at Keble College, Oxford. He was subsequently awarded a Lister Institute Senior Research Fellowship, an Amersham Medical Fellowship (Keble College) and then a Monsanto Senior Research Fellowship (Exeter College, Oxford). This very successful career path led to him being awarded the Wellcome Prize in Physiology in 2002 and in the same year he was granted a personal Chair at Oxford. Parekh’s research interests are on intracellular calcium signalling and how changes in calcium can engender a wide range of cellular responses. His work is particularly focused on the store-operated calcium channels (CRAC channels) on the plasma membrane. These channels are most abundant in non-excitable tissues and can have a wide ranging impact upon cellular function through their influence upon gene expression. It is known that their function is disturbed in a variety of debilitating diseases such as primary immuno-deficiencies, acute pancreatitis and possibly Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore, an understanding of their regulation and downstream actions is vital if strategies are to be developed to treat or prevent these diseases in the long term.

The Health and Exercise Sciences Research Group at the University of Stirling was honoured to be chosen by Parekh and The Physiological Society as one of the venues to host the prestigious GL Brown Prize Lecture. We welcomed a small but enthusiastic audience of staff, postgraduates and undergraduates from Stirling, Aberdeen, Heriot-Watt, and Dundee Universities on the only Scottish leg of his lecture tour. Parekh presented an interesting and humorous historical introduction on the importance of calcium in organ systems, highlighting the work of Ringer which was published in The Journal of Physiology in 1882 and 1883. He went on to present a fascinating overview of his work on the mechanisms and function of the store-operated calcium channels (particularly Orai1) and highlighted their research on CRAC channel opening and activation of the calcineurin NFAT gene expression pathway in mast cells. Parekh also demonstrated the importance of dysregulation in calcium signaling through his work on patients with nasal polyps, suggesting that therapies targeting these calcium channels are likely in the future management of such conditions. His lecture clearly stimulated the audience as evidenced by the many questions afterwards and the discussions that followed late into the evening.