Centre for Reproductive Health
Centre for Reproductive Health
Institute for Regeneration and Repair
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Dr Veronique Miron

Research interest and grants.

Dr Veronique Miron

Senior Lecturer and Principal Investigator

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Biographical Information

Veronique Miron obtained her PhD in 2009 in Neurological Sciences from McGill University (Canada), funded by studentships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and was awarded the European Charcot Foundation Young Investigator Award. Following a brief postodoc in Neuroimmunology at the Montreal Neurological Institute, she carried out a postdoc in Regenerative Medicine at The Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, funded by the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. She set up her lab in the MRC Centre for Reproductive Health with an MRC Career Development Award, and is now a Senior Lecturer and an MRC Senior Non-Clinical Research Fellow, leading a team of 7 researchers.

Veronique’s research focuses on investigating the regenerative properties of inflammation to drive central nervous system white matter regeneration, with implications for neurological disorders with high worldwide prevalence (such as cerebral palsy and MS).  She has >17 years of research experience in regenerative medicine, myelin biology and neuroimmunology, including proficiency developing and applying in vitro/ ex vivo/ in vivo modelling of neurological disease, transgenic approaches, advanced imaging platforms, high through-put imaging/analysis, and neuropathological analysis. She has authored 33 publications, including in Nature Neuroscience, Acta Neuropathologica, and Annals of Neurology.

She is an active champion of equal opportunity in research, heading the Athena Swan postgraduate working group, writing blogs on women in research, and chairing the Power Hour at the GRC Myelin conference. She is also the founder and organizer for Edinburgh’s first Microglia Club.

Research interests

Cerebral palsy is a lifelong disorder with no cure, incurred perinatally and characterized by severe motor impairments. The main contributor to the development of cerebral palsy is brain injury incurred in preterm and full-term infants, directed primarily at white matter (myelin) and the cells that make myelin, cells of the oligodendrocyte lineage. Current treatments aim to dampen injury and are only marginally effective at improving deficits due to their inability to promote myelin repair. Thus, there is a pressing need for the development of therapies for cerebral palsy that promote this repair thereby rescuing clinical deficits.

The research group is taking a novel approach to doing this by harnessing the regenerative properties of inflammation, in particular, macrophages (including CNS-resident microglia). Although macrophages have traditionally been implicated in inducing central nervous system injury, our recent studies show that anti-inflammatory macrophages drive myelin regeneration in the adult brain. Our overarching goal is to build on these findings to develop new strategies to promote myelin generation following developmental brain injury, by manipulating macrophage activation and identifying the regenerative factors they produce.

The main areas of research of our group are:

  • To characterize the role of microglia/ macrophage activation in perinatal brain injury & repair,
  • To elucidate the cellular and molecular mechanisms regulating microglia/ macrophage activation following injury and during repair of the central nervous system,
  • To compare the inflammatory and regenerative mechanisms following injury in developing vs adult central nervous system (e.g. MS),
  • To discover novel therapeutic targets by identifying microglia/ macrophage-derived regenerative factors.

Follow the Miron lab’s research interests and progress on twitter

Current lab members

  • Georgie Craig (Postdoctoral fellow)
  • Lindsey Forbes (Postdoctoral fellow)
  • Alana Hoffmann (DFG Postdoctoral fellow)
  • Rebecca Holloway (Senior research assistant)
  • Sarah Kent (Wellcome Trust Translational Neuroscience PhD student)
  • Ayisha Mahmood (NC3Rs PhD student)
  • Niamh McNamara (Wellcome Trust Tissue Repair PhD student)
  • Irene Molina (Postdoctoral fellow)
  • Lucy Ryan (Hugh S P Binnie PhD student)
Picture of the Miron Lab

Grants

  • Miron VE. MRC Senior Non-Clinical Fellowship, £2.7 million, 2021-2026.
  • Miron VE and Priller J. MS Society project grant, £176,630. 2020-2022.
  • Miron VE. MRC/ MS Society Career Development Award, £1.5 million. 2015-2020.
  • Miron VE. PhD studentship from NC3Rs, £90,000. 2019-2022.
  • Miron VE. PhD studentship from the UK Multiple Sclerosis Society, £94,725. 2017-2020.
  • Miron VE. Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund, £38,388. 2018-2019.
  • Miron VE, Norman JE, Gressens P. Action Medical Research, £199,356. 2015-2018.
  • Miron VE, BBSRC-GSK CASE studentship & grant, £96,126. 2014-2018.
  • Miron VE. RS MacDonald Trust, £60,000. 2014-2017.
  • Miron VE. Tommy’s the Baby Charity, £20,000. 2014.
  • Industry collaborations with: Astex (2022-2025), ReWind Therapeutics (2019), Clene Nanomedicine (2016-2017), Biogen (2014-2017), GSK (2014-2018), BVBioMed (2016), CDRD (2015)

Selected publications

  1. Holloway RK, Ireland G, Sullivan G, Becher JC, Smith C, Boardman JP, Gressens P, Miron VE (2021). Microglial inflammasome activation drives developmental white matter injury. Glia. 2021 May;69(5):1268-1280. 
  2. Miron VE and Priller J. Investigating microglia in health and disease: challenges and opportunities (2020). Trends in Immunology. doi: 10.1016/j.it.2020.07.002 
  3. Lloyd A, Davies C, Holloway R, Labrak Y, Ireland G, Carradori D, Dillenburg A, Borger E, Soong D, Richardson J, Kuhlmann T, Williams A, Pollard J, des Rieux A, Priller J, Miron VE (2019). Central nervous system regeneration requires microglia death and repopulation. Nature Neuroscience doi: 10.1038/s41593-019-0418-z 
  4. Lloyd AF, Miron VE. The regenerative role of microglia in the central nervous system (2019). Nature Reviews Neurology. doi: 10.1038/s41582-019-0184-2 
  5. Dillenburg A, Ireland GI, Holloway RK, Davies CL, Evans FL, Swire M, Bechler ME, Soong D, Yuen TJ, Su GH, Becher JC, Smith C, Williams A, Miron VE (2018). Activin receptors regulate the oligodendrocyte lineage in health and disease. Acta Neuropathologica ePub doi: 10.1007/s00401-018-1813-3. 
  6. Rojo R, Raper A, Ozdemir DO, Lefevre L, Grabert K, Wollscheid-Lengeling E, BradfordB, Caruso M, Gazova I, Sánchez A, Lisowski ZM, Alves J, Molina I, Davtyan H, Lodge RJ, Glover JD, Wallace R, Munro DAD, David E, Amit I, Miron VE, Priller J, Jenkins SJ, Hardingham G, Blurton-Jones M, Mabbott NA, Summers KM, Hohenstein P, Hume DA, Pridans C (2019). Deletion of CSF1R enhancer selectively impacts CSF1R expression and development of tissue macrophage populations. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11053-8 
  7. Davies CL, Gyoneva S, Coulter A, Ransohoff R, Miron VE (2019). Cell isolation and RNA preparation from experimental focal remyelinating lesions. Methods in Molecular Biology, editors David Lyons and Linde Kegel.doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-9072-6_2
  8. Van Steenwinckel J, Schang AL, Krishnan ML, Degos V, Delahaye-Duriez A, Bokobza C, Csaba Z, Verdonk F, Montané A, Sigaut S, Hennebert O, Lebon S, Schwendimann L, Le Charpentier T, Hassan-Abdi R, Ball G, Aljabar P, Saxena A, Holloway RK, Birchmeier W, Baud O, Rowitch D, Miron VE, Chretien F, Leconte C, Besson VC, Petretto EG, Edwards AD, Hagberg H, Soussi-Yanicostas N, Fleiss B, Gressens P (2019) Decreased microglial Wnt/β-catenin signalling drives microglial pro-inflammatory activation in the developing brain. Brain. doi: 10.1093/brain/awz319. 
  9. Boardman JP, Ireland GI, Sullivan G, Pataky R, Fleiss B, Gressens P, Miron VE (2018) The cerebrospinal fluid inflammatory response to preterm birth. Frontiers in Physiology doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.01299. 
  10. Miron VE, Boyd A, Zhao JW, Yuen TJ, Ruckh JM, Shadrach JL, vWijngaarden AJ, Wajers AJ, Williams A, Franklin RJM, ffrench-Constant C (2013). M2 microglia/ macrophages drive oligodendrocyte differentiation during CNS remyelination. Nature Neuroscience. 16(9):1211-1218.

 

 

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