HONORARY FELLOWS LECTURE - Every breath you take and every move you make - understanding cellular oxygen sensing mechanisms

Wed 6 March 2024

Department of Chemistry

The Honorary Fellows Lecture by Professor Sir Peter Ratcliffe FRS, Distinguished Scholar, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University of Oxford and Clinical Research Director, Francis Crick Institute, London.

The fourth talk in a series of lectures organised by the Cambridge Philosophical Society in the Lent Term 2024.

Abstract: The maintenance of oxygen homeostasis is a key physiological challenge, inadequate oxygen (hypoxia) being a major component of most human diseases. The lecture will trace insights into human oxygen homeostasis from the founding work of William Harvey on the circulation of the blood to the molecular elucidation of a system of oxygen sensing that functions to measure oxygen levels in cells and control adaptive responses to hypoxia. The lecture will outline how the oxygen sensitive signal is generated by a set of ‘oxygen splitting’ enzymes that modify a transcription factor (HIF) to signal for its degradation (and hence inactivation). It will attempt to illustrate and rationalise the unexpected in biological discovery and discuss the interface of discovery science with the development of medical therapeutics.

Cost: free