Turku Bioscience is a research centre hosted jointly by University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University offering technology services and producing top research in biosciences. Michael Courtney’s Neuronal Signaling Laboratory is one of the research groups working under this umbrella organization. His small, but agile research group is doing basic research on cell signalling and the first stages of drug development. “Almost everything we do is related to neurological diseases. After all, drugs usually target cell signaling “, says Michael who considers their research more applied than basic.
Michael’s group is working with cell-based systems and proteins related to neurological disorders using optical and bioinformatic methods. To mention few of the many ongoing studies, the group is currently working with proteins related to synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease, neuropathic pain and SynGAP syndrome (with a focus on NOS1AP and SynGAP1 proteins), and is increasingly using human patient-specific neurons. Michael describes their approach as follows: “We should understand the functions of specific proteins associated with a disease, but we also need to see how the protein acts in living cells. When we do this, we realise that each cell is actually doing something a bit different. Traditional methods show only the averaged behavior of the cell population, but this does not describe what individual cells are doing. We need to consider how this variability across cells affects biological outcomes. That is why optical methods and live cell microscopy are really valuable, and bioinformatics methods are needed to interpret the data”. Bioinformatics is an important field of collaboration, as research groups increasingly need their own data-analysts to apply the latest methods from this rapidly developing field.
Michael’s group is having wide collaboration with several other groups inside Finland and also abroad. The team is collaborating with animal model experts in PET centre to evaluate the effects of developed cell pathway inhibitors, with omics experts to develop new and improved methods to understand disease mechanisms, such as synaptic changes. They are also collaborating with patient groups directly, especially those representing SynGAP syndrome patients, to identify possible new approaches for therapeutic treatments. The collaboration with clinical researchers has also been discussed, especially in the case where Michael’s group is using a drug that has already been approved and clinical researchers could use these on the treatment resistant patients.
Michael sees development of methods as an essential tool for better research. For example, their group developed recently a novel optogenetic approach for controlling cell signaling networks. For more information, please visit: https://www.utu.fi/en/news/press-release/researchers-develop-a-simplified-method-to-modify-disease-signaling-with-light.
In addition to research, one of the major functions of Turku Bioscience is to offer research services. In co-operation with Professor of Medicinal Chemistry Olli Pentikäinen and the structural bioinformatics laboratory at Åbo Academy University, Michael’s group started to provide services for chemical, drug and genetic perturbation screens for researchers and lab automation other core facilities. The services are part of a national drug discovery and chemical biology network coordinated by Biocenter Finland. Michael describes their screening unit services as follows: “We can provide researchers with the capacity to measure let’s say 10000 different chemical compounds. For example, it would be possible to check for drugs, which are already approved: we have about 4000 of these, and larger compound libraries on site. If someone has a target, we can help establish an assay and screen these drugs and other compound. This might be helpful in the early stage of drug discovery, or to identify reference compounds for preclinical in vivo studies.” Their services are agile and usable by any researcher who is interested in early drug discovery and wants to find either repurposed drugs or chemical biology tools, as Michael calls the compounds, for a certain target.
For more information on screening unit, please visit following web page: https://bioscience.fi/services/screening/services/
In case of questions or collaboration requests, you can contact Michael’s group:
michael.courtney@utu.fi
+358 29 450 3739