https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.126.45

Dr Austin Elliott, University of
Manchester, UK

Mark Dunne, who died unexpectedly from a heart attack in his sleep on 18 December  2021, was born in St Helens, one of three children of Eddie, a professional driver, and Pat, who worked at a school for children with special educational needs. Mark’s friends from his teenage years remember him as a leader in mischief and in obscure “alternative” music appreciation – both familiar to Mark’s later colleagues. He was also a keen schoolboy rugby and football player. Mark retained his St Helens (“it’s not Scouse!”) accent, and a devotion to St Helens Rugby (League) Football Club, all his life, passing on his enthusiasm for sport, and his allegiance to “The Saints”, to his daughters Maija, Anya and Orla-Mae.

After a Biochemistry BSc at Warwick (1983) Mark got a job as a Research Assistant in Ole Petersen’s famous electrophysiology group in Liverpool, where he was ultimately to spend 7 years as a PhD student and latterly postdoc. After some initial work on Ca2+-activated K+ channels he switched to the then recently discovered ATP-sensitive potassium channel. Using the insulinoma cell line RINm5F, Mark helped to map out the sensitivity of KATP to different nucleotides in a series of papers. This formative period set him on his scientific path for the rest of his career.

By the start of the 90s, Mark was ready to start his own lab, and moved in 1990 to a Lecturer post in Sheffield. Here he rapidly established a young and lively research group. Of his early “alumni”, two, Jonathan Jaggar and Paul Squires, have become Professors, at the University of Tennessee Memphis, US and the University of Lincoln, US, respectively. Other key figures in the Dunne lab in the Sheffield years were Mark’s long-time lab manager Ruth Shepherd, and his later life partner and long-time collaborator Karen Cosgrove. Ruth and Karen both moved with Mark to Manchester in early 2003.

Early in the Sheffield years, Mark took the key decision to focus the lab on working with human beta-cells, rather than with rat or mouse cells, or with the cell lines he and others had earlier used to study KATP channels. Human islets were available from islet transplant programmes, though accessing them required establishing a lot of collaborations with clinicians around the UK, which Mark did with his usual energy and people skills. Over the next couple of years, Mark and his lab worked out the details of how to isolate and patch-clamp human betacells.

In the mid 90s, the human beta-cell work led to what was to become Mark’s primary research interest for the rest of his career, the rare but serious disease of congenital hyperinsulinism. Mark had forged a link with clinicians at Great Ormond Street treating children with severe forms of the disease. These children often required pancreatectomy to stop uncontrolled insulin secretion and severe hypoglycaemia, and Mark was able to obtain cells from the tissue to test. The striking result was that KATP channels, so prominent in normal beta-cells, could not be detected, leaving cells permanently depolarised. Mark’s lab collaborated with Lydia and Joe Aguilar-Bryan, who had earlier established the molecular identity of the KATP channel. A landmark case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, and other publications, showed that mutations in the sulphonylurea receptor led to non-functional KATP channels, and that this was the cause of at least some of the most severe cases of congenital hyperinsulinism. This work put Mark’s Sheffield group firmly on the map, and in 1998, at only 37, he become the University’s then-youngest full Professor.

In 1999 Mark took on the job of Society Meetings Secretary for 3 years, which made him a familiar figure to UK physiologists. Running six meetings a year gave Mark’s personal, diplomatic and organising skills a workout, and the late 90s saw the start of a continuing trend to joint meetings with sister societies in Europe and elsewhere. Mark was always in his element at scientific meetings, though he did not enjoy the time-honoured Phys Society custom of the Meetings Secretary having to compose light-hearted “minutes of the previous meeting” and read them aloud after the meeting dinner. The practice was finally dropped just after the end of his tenure.

In the late 90s and into the 2000s, Mark’s interest in diabetes and hypoglycaemia led him, like many others in the beta-cell field, to get interested in the idea of “replacing” beta-cells, particularly with cells derived from stem cells. On moving to Manchester in 2003, Mark was one of the prime movers in setting up a facility for stem cell biology. In Manchester he and Karen started a series of collaborations with local clinicians and endocrinologists, on subjects as diverse as fish-oils and extracellular matrix influences on beta-cell development. The core of the lab’s work remained hyperinsulinism, and a number of the region’s junior clinician scientists passed through the lab. Mark’s enthusiasm for new scientific ventures never flagged, as his 120+ career publications testify.

The 2003 move to Manchester shifted Mark into a senior organisational and leadership role, and during his first Manchester decade he served as Head of Physiology & Pharmacology and Chair of the Biomedicine Teaching and Exam Boards. He steered the phys/pharm grouping through two building
moves whilst shouldering his full share of admin, teaching and examining duties. He also took on jobs outside the University, including for hyperinsulinism charities, and was rarely without an undergraduate External Examinership on the go. As one contributor to his memorial page noted “it would be hard to imagine a more balanced and collegial colleague”. The page, set up to honour Mark, has 100+ appreciations, including from undergraduate students past and present, as well as from friends and colleagues.

Mark and Karen’s Manchester family home in Marple, on the edge of the Peak District, reflected their joint love of the outdoors. Mark was a keen cyclist, often cycling the dozen or so miles into the University – though in latter years he switched to an electric bike to help with the hills on the way back. Mark was above all a proud and devoted father. His social media feeds were full of their three girls’ academic and sporting achievements, or family pictures at Saints’ games, most recently their 2021 Grand Final victory.