Professor John Wood

University College London

Professor John N. Wood, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., FRS, graduated from Leeds University and studied Virology at Warwick University. He moved to the Institut Pasteur in 1976 to work as a postdoctoral fellow with Luc Montagnier on Interferons, before transitioning to Neuroscience thanks to meeting Tom Jessell. He worked for 12 years in Industry (Wellcome Foundation and Sandoz Institute). He identified a number of new analgesic targets in studies of transgenic mice. An ATP-gated channel (P2X3) is the target of a drug called Gefapixant in honour of Geoff Burnstock. With Armen Akopian, he also cloned a sodium channel named Na_V1.8 that is important for human pain. Vertex have produced an orally active channel blocker - Journavx or Suzetrigine that is a useful analgesic. John founded Ionix Pharmaceuticals, to make Na_V1.8 channel blockers in 2002 without success. In 2009 he was elected to the Royal Society and won the Grand Prix Scientifique of the Institut de France. More recently, he and others showed that Na_V1.7, another sodium channel, plays a key role in human pain, and explained the mechanism behind this, but the genetic basis of pain loss (with compensatory expression of other channels) does not translate into useful therapeutics because of bad side effects. His recent work focusses on chemogenetic studies of cancer pain.

Dr Samantha Salvage

City St George's, University of London

Samantha Salvage’s research primarily focuses on cardiac ion channel regulation in the context of cellular and molecular determinants of conduction and arrhythmia. During her PhD at the University of Surrey she investigated the effects of intracellular Ca²⁺ and calcineurin regulation of cardiac gap junction resistance. This was followed by post-doctoral research on ryanodine receptor (RyR2) dysfunction on conduction and arrhythmogenesis in the labs of Dr James Fraser and Prof Chris Huang at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at Cambridge, and RyR2 gating properties with Prof Angela Dulhunty on a visiting fellowship at the Australian National University. More recently, she has been studying the structural and functional regulation of cardiac Nav1.5 by beta subunits, small molecules and fragment antibodies in the lab of Dr Tony Jackson, Dept Biochemistry, Cambridge. She has recently taken up a post as lecturer in cardiovascular sciences at City St George’s, University of London where she will continue her research in cardiac ion channel regulation and beyond.

Dr Jim Reid

Domainex

Jim Reid is a Senior Principal Scientist in Protein Science at Domainex, where he has worked since 2008. With 20+ years in drug discovery, he has led internal and client programmes across kinases, nuclear hormone receptors, transcription factors, epigenetic targets, proteases, and protein–protein interactions. His expertise spans molecular biology, bacterial and eukaryotic expression, Combinatorial Domain Hunting (CDH), purification and structural biology, with a current focus on membrane protein purification using polymer-based nanodiscs. Jim earned a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Aberdeen on the human androgen receptor and completed a fellowship at the CRUK London Research Institute with Dr Jesper Svejstrup, investigating mechanisms of transcriptional regulation.

Dr Oliver Acton

AstraZeneca

Oliver Acton is an Associate Principal Scientist within Discovery Sciences at AstraZeneca where he has been for the last 5 years. Oliver obtained his PhD from the Francis Crick Institute in London focussing on structural biology on retrovirus assembly and host-cell restriction. Subsequently, he carried out post-doctoral work at the University of Washington combining CryoEM and protein design to develop novel vaccine immunogens as well as characterisation of novel antibodies against multiple respiratory viruses. Since joining AstraZeneca, Oliver’s focus has been on driving the implementation of CryoEM in structure-based drug design across multiple therapy areas, modalities and target classes including several membrane proteins and ion channels. In addition, he leads structural biology efforts in the design and characterisation of novel vaccine platforms against multiple pathogens.

Dr Gary Clark

Metrion

Dr Gary Clark is Metrion’s Director of Ion Channel Screening and has over 25 years of experience in ion channel drug discovery, including more than 20 years in contract research. At Metrion, Gary is responsible for overseeing screening strategy and delivery, with a particular focus on ion channel assay development, automated electrophysiology, and high-throughput screening platforms.

Gary began his career in biotech, where he was closely involved in the early development and adoption of automated patch-clamp technologies. In 2005, he joined BioFocus (now Charles River) as a Team Leader, where he successfully implemented automated electrophysiology capabilities for contract research applications.

During his time at BioFocus and Charles River, Gary led numerous client ion channel programmes across the preclinical pipeline, including assay development, cell line generation, high-throughput screening, and hit-to-lead/lead optimisation. His work has spanned several therapeutic areas, with a particular emphasis on pain and respiratory indications.

Gary holds a BSc (Hons) in Zoology and Physiology from Royal Holloway, University of London, and earned his PhD in cardiac electrophysiology from Coventry University. He is the author of peer-reviewed publications in the field.

Dr Jim Hockley

GSK

Dr Jim Hockley is a research leader working at the interface of neuroscience and immunology at GSK with the goal of delivering translational biology to enable the development of new medicines to improve patient health. Jim has worked across a variety of therapeutic areas leading teams to support ion channel drug development programmes at both preclinical and clinical stages. Prior to GSK, he completed post-doctoral training at University of Cambridge and Pfizer and has published extensively on the molecular mechanisms of pain, and in particular, visceral pain.

Jim holds a Masters in Biochemistry from University of Bath and PhD from Queen Mary University of London.

Associate Professor David Bulmer

University of Cambridge

Dr David Bulmer has led translational research groups investigating drug targets for the treatment of abdominal pain in gastrointestinal disease for over 20 years, working in both academia and industry. Most recently his group has combined the use of human tissue assays, single cell transcriptomics and nociceptor recordings to identify and validate mechanisms regulating visceral pain.

Dr Ali Obergrussberger

Nanion

Dr Alison Obergrussberger completed her PhD in 2004 from the University of Dundee where she used the conventional patch clamp technique to record GABA_A receptors from cerebellar brain slices of knock-out and knock-in mice. Ali then spent 2 years as a post doctoral researcher at the University of Queensland before joining Nanion in 2006 as an Application Scientist. Ali is now Director of Scientific Sales and Customer Engagement at Nanion, she has worked with numerous automated patch clamp devices and is an expert in the field of automated patch clamp and ion channels.

Dr Sarah Lilley

Sophion Bioscience

Sarah Lilley’s extensive electrophysiology and ion channel assay development experience has been built across a variety of backgrounds. Following a Neuropharmacology PhD at Kings College London with Dr Jon Robbins, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr David Ogden and Prof Iain Robinson at the National Institute for Medical Research before moving towards the industry sector. After 8 years focussing on ion channels as drug targets for respiratory disease at Novartis, she moved to a unique opportunity in academic drug discovery at Sussex University, culminating in both the successful development of a novel first-in-class clinical candidate for cystic fibrosis with Enterprise Therapeutics (working with Prof Martin Gosling and Dr Henry Danahay) and the formation of a technology partnership between the university and preclinical electrophysiology specialists Sophion Bioscience. 10 years later, she continues to work as a consultant in ion channel assay development for Sophion, with a particular interest in keeping enabling ion channel technologies within academic reach.

Dr Alex Pinggera

Metrion

Alexandra leads the manual patch clamp team at Metrion where she has oversight of client projects together with line and resource management responsibilities.

Alexandra did her PhD at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) focussing on L-type voltage gated Ca²⁺ channel physiology and pharmacology, predominantly using whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology.

Subsequently, Alexandra carried out her post-doctoral research in neuroscience at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) where she investigated various aspects of AMPA receptor signalling at hippocampal synapses using super-resolution imaging and different electrophysiological techniques.

She joined Metrion in September 2021 and has since contributed to numerous ion-channel projects, including establishing the technique for the electrophysiological recording from isolated lysosomes.