Biography:
Born and raised in the sunny seaside town of Bournemouth, Alex completed his BSc in Biomedical Science at The University of Surrey, which included a year research internship in Hubert Amrein's lab at Texas A&M University. Alex worked with the common fruit fly as a model organism in order to better understand human taste perception which is still a relatively unknown field. After graduating, he worked in Greece, carrying out turtle conservation on the beautiful island of Kefalonia. Two jobs in industry flew-by at AstraZeneca and Horizon Discovery (working with CRISPR) over the next few years, before he found himself at the doors of the MRC Toxicology Unit as a Research Assistant at first, and then a PhD student.
Research Interests:
The dawn of RNA-based drugs is finally among us with some incredible leaps forward in the last few years. The development of CRISPR-based therapeutics as well as base editing and siRNA have expanded the toolkit available for targeting debilitating diseases at the RNA level. In addition, the approval of RNA-based SARS-CoV2 vaccines have demonstrated that delivery of these therapeutics is feasible and even more powerful than previous technology. Alex works on RNA-based Antisense Oligonucleotides which have achieved a number of approvals over the last few years, but have seen various toxicities in the clinic. The mechanisms underpinning this toxicity isn't fully understood and Alex is working hard to establish a better understanding of them.
