IIT External Seminar Series | Prof. Pascal Meier

Thurs 27 April 2023 | 12:00 -13:00 | Pears Building and online via Teams 

"Using cell death to mobilise the immune system against cancer"

Speaker: Prof Pascal Meier from the Institute of Cancer Research UK 

Host: Prof Benedict Seddon

12:00 - Seminar 

13:00 - Pizza lunch with trainees 

Prof. Meier’s Biosketch:

Pascal Meier received his Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Zürich, Switzerland. After postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Gerard Evan at the London Research Institute (LRI, former ICRF) at Cancer Research-UK, London, he started his independent research as a group leader at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. His lab focusses on the complex relationship between Cell Death and Inflammation, and how this can be exploited to drive immunogenic cell death and mobilise the immune system against cancer. He discovered the functional role of Inhibitor of APoptosis (IAP) proteins, and how they modulate cell death and inflammatory signalling cascades. He demonstrated that IAPs function as last line of defence from caspase-mediated cell death, and that IAPs act as ubiquitin-E3 ligases and ubiquitin-receptors that regulate caspase-dependent as well as caspase-independent signalling processes. He made several key contributions, which firmly established that IAPs function at the crossroad of cell death regulation and inflammation, a viewpoint that is currently being exploited in clinical trials with pharmacological inhibitors of IAPs (SMAC mimetics). More recently, he discovered the ‘ripoptosome’, a large protein complex that functions as the body’s major stress sentinel, coordinating NF-kB and interferon signalling as well as apoptosis, necroptosis and pyroptosis. He is a member of the Young Investigator Programme (YIP, elected 2003), European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO, 2013), and received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award 2012.