Just as people and populations are diverse – motivating ideas of personalised medicine, nerve cells – or neurons – of the brain are immensely diverse in their types and “individual” circuits that become diseased or damaged in humans. This lecture considers newly accessible molecular routes to more specific future therapies. The long-term goals of the research to be discussed in this Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture are to understand, at a “subcellular” molecular level, controls over the initial growth – the “development” – and diversity of cerebral cortex function-specific circuitry, and diversity of mature function. The work aims to identify causes, mechanisms, and thus potential “circuit-customised” therapeutic approaches to developmental, neuropsychiatric and degenerative disease, and to elucidate and potentially overcome blocks to brain and spinal cord regeneration in disorders like spinal cord injury. The specificity, modification, and function of quite diverse brain circuitry underlies how the brain-nervous system senses, integrates, moves the body, thinks, functions with precision, malfunctions with specificity in disease, degenerates with circuit specificity, might be regenerated, and/or might be better modeled in the laboratory. However, many relevant aspects of this neuronal circuit diversity and distinctness have been inaccessible in multiple core aspects until quite recently. Understanding what actually implements and maintains circuit specificity is a key issue regarding childhood developmental nervous system abnormalities and disease, proper function vs. dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders, selective neuron type vulnerability of degeneration (e.g. in motor neuron disease (MND-ALS), Huntington’s, Parkinson’s diseases), regeneration (or typical lack thereof) for spinal cord injury, and investigations of disease using human pluripotent stem cell (hiPS)-derived neurons. Professor Jeffrey D. Macklis’ talk will consider possibilities of taking the idea of “personalised medicine”- tailored to an individual based on individual information – in a complementary direction– tailoring therapies to specific diseased or damaged brain circuitry. This is the Dr Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture organised by the Oxford Martin School, Oxford Martin Programme on 3D Printing for Brain Repair and the Centre for Personalised Medicine.

Just as people and populations are diverse – motivating ideas of personalised medicine, nerve cells – or neurons – of the brain are immensely diverse in their types and “individual” circuits that become diseased or damaged in humans. This lecture considers newly accessible molecular routes to more specific future therapies. The long-term goals of the research to be discussed in this Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture are to understand, at a “subcellular” molecular level, controls over the initial growth – the “development” – and diversity of cerebral cortex function-specific circuitry, and diversity of mature function. The work aims to identify causes, mechanisms, and thus potential “circuit-customised” therapeutic approaches to developmental, neuropsychiatric and degenerative disease, and to elucidate and potentially overcome blocks to brain and spinal cord regeneration in disorders like spinal cord injury. The specificity, modification, and function of quite diverse brain circuitry underlies how the brain-nervous system senses, integrates, moves the body, thinks, functions with precision, malfunctions with specificity in disease, degenerates with circuit specificity, might be regenerated, and/or might be better modeled in the laboratory. However, many relevant aspects of this neuronal circuit diversity and distinctness have been inaccessible in multiple core aspects until quite recently. Understanding what actually implements and maintains circuit specificity is a key issue regarding childhood developmental nervous system abnormalities and disease, proper function vs. dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders, selective neuron type vulnerability of degeneration (e.g. in motor neuron disease (MND-ALS), Huntington’s, Parkinson’s diseases), regeneration (or typical lack thereof) for spinal cord injury, and investigations of disease using human pluripotent stem cell (hiPS)-derived neurons. Professor Jeffrey D. Macklis’ talk will consider possibilities of taking the idea of “personalised medicine”- tailored to an individual based on individual information – in a complementary direction– tailoring therapies to specific diseased or damaged brain circuitry. This is the Dr Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture organised by the Oxford Martin School, Oxford Martin Programme on 3D Printing for Brain Repair and the Centre for Personalised Medicine.

Professor Andrew Hattersley gave the 2022 CPM Annual Lecture on Thursday 26th May. This event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre. Professor Andrew Hattersley is the Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Exeter, UK and a practicing consultant diabetologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital. He trained in Medicine at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. His postgraduate education was in London, Oxford and Birmingham. Working with Professor Sian Ellard he has taken Exeter from being a centre with no genetics laboratory in 1995 to now being the top international laboratory for monogenic diabetes with over 20,000 referrals from 105 countries. They have discovered 25 genes which when mutated cause monogenic diabetes. Importantly he has gone on from gene discovery to find the best treatment for monogenic diabetes. He has shown that the commonest forms of both familial genetic diabetes and neonatal diabetes can be treated with tablets instead of insulin resulting in better blood sugar control. Recent work has focused on “Precision Diabetes” identifying subgroups in Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes with different treatment responses. He has published over 600 papers with over 90,000 citations, given over 350 national and international lecturers and received many international and national awards for his work including being appointed as a fellow of The Royal Society and being awarded a CBE.

Professor Andrew Hattersley gave the 2022 CPM Annual Lecture on Thursday 26th May. This event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre. Professor Andrew Hattersley is the Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Exeter, UK and a practicing consultant diabetologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital. He trained in Medicine at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. His postgraduate education was in London, Oxford and Birmingham. Working with Professor Sian Ellard he has taken Exeter from being a centre with no genetics laboratory in 1995 to now being the top international laboratory for monogenic diabetes with over 20,000 referrals from 105 countries. They have discovered 25 genes which when mutated cause monogenic diabetes. Importantly he has gone on from gene discovery to find the best treatment for monogenic diabetes. He has shown that the commonest forms of both familial genetic diabetes and neonatal diabetes can be treated with tablets instead of insulin resulting in better blood sugar control. Recent work has focused on “Precision Diabetes” identifying subgroups in Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes with different treatment responses. He has published over 600 papers with over 90,000 citations, given over 350 national and international lecturers and received many international and national awards for his work including being appointed as a fellow of The Royal Society and being awarded a CBE.