Transcriptional control of programmed cell death in developing neurons
6th February 2015
Jonathan Ham
Cancer Section,
Developmental Biology and Cancer Programme,
UCL Institute of Child Health.
Abstract
Developing sympathetic neurons are one of the best studied models of neuronal apoptosis.
These cells require nerve growth factor (NGF) for survival during late embryonic and early
postnatal development. In the absence of NGF, developing sympathetic neurons die by
apoptosis in a transcription-dependent manner. NGF withdrawal activates the mitochondrial
pathway of apoptosis in sympathetic neurons cultured in vitro, and the roles of caspases,
Bcl-2 family proteins and XIAP have been extensively studied. Importantly, a considerable
amount has also been learned about the intracellular signalling pathways and transcription
factors that regulate the cell death programme in sympathetic neurons. I will talk about some
of our recent work in this area.
J. Ham – short biography
After completing my PhD on the yeast cell cycle in the Biochemistry Department at UCL, I
worked on the transcriptional regulation of oncogenic viruses and basic mechanisms of gene
activation as a postdoc in the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (from 19861990) and the Oncogenic Viruses Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris (from 1990-1993). I
then became a junior group leader in a pharmaceutical company research institute on the
main UCL campus (Eisai London Research Laboratories, set up by the Eisai Company of
Japan). I worked there from 1993-1999 on the molecular mechanisms of apoptosis in
neurons and gained experience of drug development research. In 1999, I moved to the UCL
Institute of Child Heath as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and joined the
Molecular Haematology and Cancer Biology Unit (now called the Cancer Section). My
overall interest is in the transcriptional control of gene expression and we are currently
exploring this in two areas of neurobiology: developmental neurobiology - we are studying
the transcriptional control of neuronal death and survival using developing sympathetic
neurons as a model system, and neuro-oncology - we are investigating the molecular
biology of the childhood brain tumour medulloblastoma, which arises in the cerebellum and
is the most common malignant brain tumour in children.