Dr Rebecca E Graham
Chief Scientist Office Fellow
- Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences
- UK Dementia Research Institute
- Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic
Contact details
- Email: r.graham@ed.ac.uk
Background
Rebecca graduated from the University of St Andrews with a first-class integrated Masters degree in Biochemistry (MBiochem) in 2016. Since then she has gained 8 years experience working on drug discovery projects in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry across a wide range of diseases. She worked at AstraZeneca in their high-throughput screening group before moving to Edinburgh to complete her PhD with Professor Neil Carragher working on Drug Discovery for Oesophageal Cancer. In 2021 Rebecca was awarded an MRC Transition Fellowship and worked with Professor Stuart Forbes to identify drugs that promote liver regeneration. She then moved to studying neurodegenerative diseases in 2022 when she joined Professor Siddharthan Chandran and Dr Bhuvaneish Selvaraj to work on drug discovery in motor neuron disease and gained a Chief Scientist Office Fellowship in 2023.
Research summary
Rebecca’s research combines drug discovery, stem cell research, and bioinformatics to identify new therapeutic strategies and biomarkers for motor neuron disease (MND).
Dysregulation of RNA metabolism in motor neurons is a key contributor to the pathogenesis of MND; this reflects seminal discoveries in 1) MND genetics - which have identified mutations in a plethora of genes implicated in dysregulated RNA metabolism and 2) pathological studies – cytoplasmic aggregation of TDP43, an RNA/DNA binding protein, is observed in 97% MND cases including sporadic-MND. Using patient derived iPSC lines to study the early molecular changes associated with MND at the transcriptome level, she is using computational modelling to identify single and combination therapeutics, that reverse the transcriptomic changes associated with the disease.
Affiliated research centres
Invited speaker
ELRIG Drug Discovery 2022
Cameron Prize for Therapeutics 2020
Organiser
UK Regenerative Medicine Platform High-throughput Screening Workshop 2022