Professor Mike Dragunow

BSc, DipSci (Hons), MSc (Hons), PhD, FRSNZ

• NRCGD Project Leader

• Professor of Pharmacology, The University of Auckland

Research interests

Professor Mike Dragunow is interested in understanding the causes and developing treatments for human neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Stroke, Parkinson's disease, Motoneuron disease, Epilepsy and Huntington's disease. His lab uses adult human brain cell cultures as well as cell lines, to dissect out the cellular and molecular cascades underlying neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation and for directly testing new therapies.  In particular they study epigenetic mechanisms (epigenetic pharmacology – histone acetylation, DNA methylation) and transcriptional processes as well as brain inflammation.  Of particular relevance to the NRCGD is their work on brain inflammation because early-life insults (e.g. infections, maternal obesity) as well as diabetes and the metabolic syndrome, may impact on adult human brain disorders (e.g. Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease) by activating immune cells in the brain.  Mike's group is studying immune cell activation in the human brain to understand how it occurs and to develop treatments to reduce brain inflammation (e.g. testing HDAC inhibitors).

Research is also directed at studying the molecular pathology of diseased adult human brain and they have developed tissue microarray technology of adult human brain to greatly speed up this molecular pathology work.  In conjunction with this cell and tissue microarray work, Mike has been developing high content analysis and high-throughput screening technologies for cell-based assays as tools for drug screening, functional genomics and chemical genetics, and for studies of mechanisms of drug action on the brain.  High content analysis is the combined use of high-throughput microscopy and image analysis to quantify complex cellular information such as morphology, signal intensity and signal location in a cell or organelle within a cell.  The platform that has been developed with funds from the NRCGD is based around the Discovery-1 microscope and the Metamorph image analysis system. Discovery-1 is an automated inverted fluorescence and brightfield microscope and Metamorph is a powerful high through-put image analysis tool.  Discovery-1 is revolutionising the study of the complex “orchestra” of signals that permeate between and within cells (signal transduction research).  Mike has established this platform for cell-based and human brain tissue microarray studies in his lab and the wider biomedical community.

NRCGD Project: Click here for details

Biography

Professor Mike Dragunow obtained his PhD in neuropharmacology from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1986 and conducted post-doctoral studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.  He was appointed to a Personal Chair in Pharmacology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand in 1999 and in 2000 he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand.  Mike is listed in www.ISIHighlyCited.Com as a highly cited author (with well over 13,000 citations and an H-index of 63) and has published well over 200 papers.  His research focuses on studying mechanisms of neurodegeneration and brain repair using adult human brain cell cultures as well as cell lines and post-mortem adult human brain material (with tissue microarray), and the development of high through-put cell-based screening methods for testing neuroprotective and neurorestorative molecules. He has recently developed a High-Content Screening Laboratory in the Department of Pharmacology, The University of Auckland, for these and other studies.

Contact details

Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences

The University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142, New Zealand

Email ; Phone +64 9 9236403