Genome-wide, gene-specific patterns of glucorticoid-receptor coregulators critical for growth and skeletal development

MRC DTP in Precision Medicine

Up to 35 fully funded studentship positions are available across the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Our next intake will be for PhD projects commencing September 2018.

The Precision Medicine Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) offers PhD with Integrated Study studentships funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), The University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. Hosted by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and the Karolinska Institute, this prestigious programme provides PhD research training alongside taught courses over four years of study and welcomed its first cohort of students in September 2016.

This Doctoral Training Programme focuses on training PhD students in key MRC skills priorities in quantitative skills (mathematics, statistics, computation, and developing digital excellence) as applied to variety of data sources (from ‘omics’ to health records), and interdisciplinary skills including imaging and stratified medicine.

Supervisors:
Professor S. Faisal Ahmed
Dr Pawel Herzyk
Professor Lars Savendahl

Project Summary:
Although glucocorticoids (GCs) are widely used across the age span as effective therapeutic agents for several chronic illnesses, their use is also associated with a range of adverse effects, especially on growth and skeletal development. GC signaling is modulated by several hundred transcriptional co-regulator proteins and the conventional concept of transrepressors and transactivators may be too simplistic. This concept of differential regulation forms the basis of a novel group of drugs, the selective GC receptor modulators (SGRMs) that have the potential to precisely tailor the pharmacological outcome to the medical needs of the patient. However, there is very little information available on the gene-specific patterns that may be activated following exposure to SGRMs and how these patterns correlate to their effects on growth and skeletal development. This exciting and innovative project relies on a three-way collaboration between Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stockholm. It builds on long standing research collaborations between these groups and is aimed at adopting a non-selective genomic approach in models of GC and SGRM exposure that focus on growth and skeletal development. The PhD student will join a research group with a high level of interdisciplinary skills in bone and growth plate biology, endocrinology and genomics and bioinformatics.