Expert support, trusted CROs, and ready-to-use tools to accelerate GPCR drug discovery, reduce risk, and advance your discovery-stage projects. Dr. GPCR Foundry: Accelerate GPCR Drug Discovery Move from idea to insight—faster, smarter, and with confidence. Partner with our nonprofit team for expert guidance, trusted CRO collaborations, and field-tested tools that de-risk your GPCR programs and keep momentum strong. 👉 Book a Free 30-min Strategy Call Select your Challenge... ↑ Pick your challenge to see tailored solutions. Yamina's Corner Expert strategic and scientific consultancy for GPCR-focused biotechs, VCs, and CROs. From pipeline acceleration and investment de-risking to CRO differentiation — turning GPCR complexity into clear, actionable direction. Book Your Free Strategy Call GPCR University Team Membership Dr. GPCR University for your whole organization. Unified access to the full course library, live masterclasses, and community — so your team builds from the same expert-led foundation and compounds knowledge. Get Team Access Terry's Pharmacology Corner Team Membership The team tier of Terry's Corner. Give every scientist on your team access to Dr. Kenakin's weekly insights and AMAs — building shared language around GPCR data and pharmacological decisions. Get Team Access GPCR University Expert-led courses spanning GPCR drug discovery — from receptor biology to translational pharmacology. Includes live masterclasses, a full course library, and community access. Built for working scientists. Explore the University Terry's Pharmacology Corner Weekly expert content and live AMAs led by Dr. Terry Kenakin. Translates complex GPCR pharmacology into practical understanding you can apply to data interpretation, lead optimization, and candidate selection. Explore Terry's Corner Timeline Strategy Strategic workshops that replace trial-and-error with proven frameworks for biotech growth. Real-world case studies and data-driven models for pipeline prioritization, resource allocation, and milestone planning. Explore Timeline Strategy Strategic Media Partnership A premium, limited partnership (12 spots/year) that positions your company as a leader within the Dr. GPCR ecosystem. Gated content, launch campaigns, and strategic co-creation — a mission-aligned collaboration, not a media buy. Apply for a Partnership Spot CRO Bank A curated directory of GPCR-specialized CROs and technology partners. Find the right service provider for your assay, screening, or discovery needs — without wading through generic directories. Explore CRO Bank For enterprise teams and custom engagements. Find the right collaboration model for your program. Book a Strategy Call → Our Core Support Areas Discovery Consulting & Strategy Expert guidance to de-risk projects, refine strategy, and drive scientific progress. Visibility for Solution Providers Strategic media partnerships that connect your company with biotech innovators and showcase your expertise Training & Upskilling Specialized, insight-packed courses designed for discovery-phase GPCR teams. Tools & Resources Ready-to-use frameworks and resources tailored to the realities of discovery-stage GPCR work Our Partners Join these innovative organizations already benefiting from the DrGPCR Foundry. Book Plan Your Next Move in GPCR Discovery Meet directly with Dr. Yamina Berchiche for a focused strategy conversation to align your goals, uncover opportunities, and map your next steps. Let's move your GPCR discovery program forward. Wherever you are in your discovery journey, the Foundry helps GPCR biotech companies move faster and reduce risk. Let's discuss your next step.

Discover the mission, vision, and people behind the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem: uniting scientists, biotech, and innovators to advance GPCR research worldwide. Who We Are We are a global network of scientists, biotech innovators, pharma professionals, CRO leaders, and vendors—united by one mission: to make working on GPCRs easier, faster, and more collaborative. Dr. GPCR is both expert-led and community-first. We’re building together, with input from across the field. About Dr. GPCR Ecosystem We unite the GPCR Community to advance drug discovery Where GPCR Experts Move Science Forward Join the global community accelerating GPCR drug discovery through trusted insights, expert tools, and powerful connections. Join Free & Get Our Weekly News See Why it Matters 6,600+ followers 200+ Research Labs 1,500+ Scientists 50+ Biotech Companies Built by Scientists. Driven by Impact. Dr. GPCR began as a podcast. Now, it's a global ecosystem of scientists, biotech teams, CRO leaders, and trainees working to move GPCR science forward—together. We created this space to make trusted knowledge and collaborations easier to access—without noise, fluff, or hype. What We Believe The Ecosystem was built with five key beliefs: Scientific rigor first This is a space for data-driven work, not hype. Usefulness over flash Every piece of content and feature must be practical. Transparency builds trust We're open about who we are and what we do. Collaboration is key Progress in GPCR science requires a collective effort. Inclusion matters We welcome diverse voices, experiences, and expertise. We designed the Ecosystem to support your work —no matter where you are in your GPCR journey. Our Journey (So Far) From the first podcast episode to a global platform, it's all built by and for the GPCR community. 2020 First Podcast Episode Launched our podcast to share expert insights with the scientific community. 2021 2nd Annual Summit Increased our reach and impact with the GPCR Community 2022 Community Platform Expanded beyond content to create a dedicated space for GPCR scientists to connect. 2023 First Symposium Inaugural Dr. GPCR Symposium with over 100 attendees 2024 GPCR University Launched comprehensive courses and expert talks to deepen scientific understanding. 2025 Terry's Corner & Consulting Launched our exclusive program with Dr. Kenakin and offered to CROs consulting services See Full Timeline The Field Is Growing—but Fragmented As GPCR scientists, we know the problem: too much noise, too little time, and nowhere to connect that's built for us. We built Dr. GPCR to: Curate relevant data—not overwhelm you with it Connect researchers with CROs, peers, and biotech leaders Provide high-quality tools and expert insights on demand Whether you're in a lab, launching a startup, or prepping for due diligence, we built this for you. The GPCR Challenge Scientists waste an average of 12 hours per week searching for relevant GPCR research and connections. Our ecosystem cuts that time by 80%. You'll Be in Good Company From PhDs to CRO execs to rising biotech founders—this is a vetted, mission-aligned community built to help you move faster. Premium Members Include: ✔ Drug hunters at early-stage biotechs ✔ CRO leaders building assays and tools ✔ Academic researchers moving into translational work ✔ Teams preparing for fundraising or due diligence Expert Contributors Include: ✔ Terry Kenakin, with his exclusive series on GPCR pharmacology ✔ Sam Hoare, simplifying GPCR data analysis ✔ Global CROs and biotech leaders, contributing behind-the-scenes tools and insight What Makes the Ecosystem Different Built for Drug Discovery Designed by scientists in the GPCR space to accelerate your research goals Collaborative by Design Connects researchers, CROs, and biotech teams—not just profiles, real relationships. Results-Driven Every tool and content block is built to help you make a decision or move forward. ✔ GPCR-specific content ✔ Expert curation ✔ Vetted community What Joining the Ecosystem Looks Like 1 Join Free Sign up in seconds. You'll instantly receive the GPCR Weekly News (free version). 2 Get Verified We manually review each profile to ensure trust and scientific relevance. 3 Start Exploring Browse free content, community updates, and learn what's available. 4 Upgrade Anytime Premium unlocks exclusive courses, community features, and deeper insights. Start Your Journey Today Meet the Leadership Founder & Director Yamina Berchiche Get in Touch Board Member Anne M. Quinn Get in Touch Board Member Maria Waldhoer Get in Touch Co-Founder Attila Foris Get in Touch Board Member JoAnn Trejo Get in Touch Chief Matchmaker Mark Schmeizl Get in Touch Why Upgrade to Premium Everyone who joins receives the free Weekly News. Premium gives you everything else—the full toolbox for moving science forward. Free Membership Includes: ✔ Free version of GPCR Weekly News - straight to your inbox! ✔ Select news and content ✔ Ecosystem and podcast updates Premium Members Unlock: ✔ Full Weekly News access – All GPCR papers, events, jobs + expert commentary ✔ Dr. GPCR University – 5 on-demand GPCR courses, 1 project management course, 200+ expert talks ✔ Community tools – Member directories, messaging, and forums Partners Who Drive our Mission Partner Benefits Visibility to GPCR experts Direct connections Industry insights Explore Partnership Opportunities Ready to Join the Movement? Start free. Upgrade when you're ready. Dr. GPCR helps you stay ahead of the curve in science and strategy. Unlock Premium Access Join Free Now

Overview of GLP-1 physiology and receptor pharmacology, including mechanisms of GLP-1 agonists used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. < Back to Courses Introduction to GLP-1 pharmacology October 29, 2026 10 AM - 11:30 AM EST 🔒 Watch Recordings - Join Premium Access the full library of recorded Masterclass sessions. Get Live Updates Be notified when new live Masterclasses are scheduled. Introduction Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is an incretin hormone that plays a central role in the regulation of glucose metabolism and energy balance. Its discovery and characterization have led to the development of GLP-1 receptor agonists, a therapeutic class widely used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity. This session provides a foundational overview of GLP-1 physiology and receptor pharmacology. The discussion will examine how GLP-1 regulates insulin secretion, suppresses glucagon release, slows gastric emptying, and influences central appetite pathways. The session also reviews currently approved GLP-1 receptor agonists, highlighting pharmacokinetic strategies used to extend activity and comparing short- and long-acting agents in clinical practice. Instructor Marsha Pierce earned her PhD at Creighton University, where she studied the role of microRNAs in inner ear development and function. She later completed postdoctoral training at Creighton University in the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, focusing on neuroactive natural products. Dr. Pierce is currently an Associate Professor at Midwestern University. Her laboratory investigates marine-derived natural products with neuroactive properties, with particular emphasis on identifying compounds that modulate neural signaling pathways and may serve as leads for therapeutic development. In this Masterclass, she introduces the physiological and pharmacological foundations of GLP-1 receptor signaling in metabolic disease. 🔒 Watch Recordings - Join Premium Access the full library of recorded Masterclass sessions. Get Live Updates Be notified when new live Masterclasses are scheduled.

Find answers to all your questions about the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem: courses, podcasts, memberships, events, and more. Frequently asked questions Webinar University Vault Premium Pricing GPCR Masterclass YC-Biotech YC-VC YC-CRO Terrys Corner Media Partner General University Dr.GPCR Podcast What are GPCR webinars? GPCR webinars are live online scientific sessions focused on G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) biology, pharmacology, signaling, and drug discovery. Each session explores mechanistic models, translational challenges, and real-world therapeutic implications. These webinars are designed for scientists who want deep, data-driven discussion rather than surface-level overviews. Who should attend these GPCR pharmacology webinars? These webinars are ideal for: GPCR pharmacologists Medicinal chemists working on receptor targets Structural biologists Translational scientists Biotech and pharmaceutical researchers Postdoctoral fellows and graduate researchers entering drug discovery If you work directly with receptor systems, ligand design, efficacy modeling, or signaling pathways, these sessions are built for you. Are these GPCR webinars suitable for industry scientists? Yes. The content is highly relevant for biotech and pharmaceutical scientists. Topics frequently address: Receptor efficacy and bias Allosteric modulation PK/PD relationships Irreversible binding and safety considerations Translational pharmacology challenges The discussions are grounded in practical drug discovery, not just academic theory. How are these different from academic seminars or conferences? Most academic seminars focus on a single dataset or publication. These GPCR webinars focus on conceptual frameworks, models, and translational insight that apply across programs. Unlike large conferences, the live format allows direct interaction, questions, and scientific debate in real time. The goal is not presentation — it is scientific advancement. Are the webinars live or pre-recorded? The sessions are delivered live to allow direct Q&A with the speaker. Live participation gives you the opportunity to ask technical questions and engage in discussion with other scientists in the GPCR community. Selected recordings may be available afterward through the Dr. GPCR platform. Do I need prior knowledge of GPCR pharmacology? These webinars are designed for scientists with foundational knowledge in receptor pharmacology, signaling, or drug discovery. While some sessions may introduce key concepts, the overall level is advanced and assumes familiarity with pharmacological models and terminology. What topics are typically covered in GPCR webinars? Topics may include: Receptor efficacy and operational models Allosteric modulators (PAMs and NAMs) Biased agonism Dose–response modeling Calcium and signaling assays Drug–receptor kinetics Translational pharmacology strategies GPCR structure–function relationships Each session focuses on mechanistic clarity and practical application. Are these GPCR webinars free? Yes. All live GPCR webinars are free to attend. To receive early notifications, event reminders, and priority updates, you can join the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem as a free member. If you would like to go deeper beyond the live sessions, you can explore the full GPCR educational library inside Dr. GPCR University. Will attending help with continuing education or professional development? Yes. These webinars are designed to support ongoing scientific development in GPCR pharmacology and drug discovery. They provide exposure to current thinking, advanced modeling approaches, and expert interpretation of complex receptor behavior. For researchers working in biotech, pharma, or academia, this type of continuing education can strengthen both technical expertise and strategic thinking. How often are new GPCR webinars added? New live GPCR webinars are added regularly as part of the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem’s ongoing educational initiative. Upcoming sessions are announced in advance and updated on this page. Where can I find advanced GPCR training online? Dr. GPCR provides live GPCR webinars, masterclasses, and in-depth educational resources focused specifically on receptor pharmacology and drug discovery. These programs are designed for scientists seeking advanced, mechanism-focused training in GPCR biology.

Monitor GPCR internalization in real time with pHSense™ – no-wash, TR-FRET reagents from Revvity. Fast, clear, live-cell receptor trafficking detection. Unlock microscopy-free real-time GPCR internalization with pHSense pHSense™ probes are optimized reagents for plate readers, specifically designed to study internalization using time-resolved fluorescence (TRF) detection. They offer high-sensitivity, no-wash detection of internalization events in a scalable, plate-based format. This technology supports robust analysis even at low endogenous receptor expression levels. Suitable for basal/constitutive and agonist-induced GPCR internalization Compatible with TRF plate readers No-wash protocol simplifies workflow Formats available for modified GPCR cell lines or unmodified primary cells Explore pHSense Products Powered by Revvity’s legacy of innovation in translational science. Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Partner Visit Website Precision Tools for Translational Science Revvity is a global leader in life science innovation, delivering tools and technologies that bridge the gap between discovery and real-world impact. With decades of expertise and an unwavering focus on precision, Revvity empowers scientists to simplify complex workflows, accelerate discovery, and drive breakthroughs in drug development, diagnostics, and disease biology. Whether you’re decoding signaling pathways or designing the next generation of therapeutics, Revvity isn’t just a provider—they’re your partner in discovery. Discover pHSense™ portfolio From binding to signaling to internalization: Cell-based fluorescence assays for complete GPCR characterization The principle of pHSense™ relies on the pH-dependent fluorescence activation of a europium-labeled antibody to monitor receptor internalization in live cells. Neutral pH = low signal: The probe is minimally fluorescent at extracellular neutral pH (≥7), which means it doesn't emit a strong signal when bound to the surface. Internalization into acidic compartments = signal activation: Upon receptor-mediated endocytosis, the probe is internalized into acidic intracellular compartments (like early/late endosomes and lysosomes). The europium complex becomes increasingly fluorescent as the pH drops, enabling dynamic tracking of internalization. Time-Resolved Fluorescence (TRF) = High Signal-to-Background: Europium’s long-lived fluorescence allows TRF detection, which effectively filters out short-lived background signals. This results in high sensitivity and specificity in no-wash, plate-based live-cell assays. pHSense™ Eu Anti-FLAG Designed for the detection of FLAG-tagged receptor and membrane protein internalization. View Product pHSense Eu SNAP Labeling Reagent Can be used to label receptors and membrane proteins carrying an extracellular SNAP sequence with a pHSense probe to monitor their internalization View Product pHSense Fab Anti-Human or Anti-Mouse IgG Fab fragments for monitoring GPCR and antibody internalization in unmodified cells The Fab Anti-Human IgG Eu-conjugate can be used in combination with a neutral anti-GPCR to address unmodified receptors in primary cells View Product The Fab Anti-Mouse IgG2 Eu-conjugate is suited to study mouse biologics targeting GPCR and confirm their internalization effects on receptors. View Product The pHSense™ Advantage Clarity. Consistency. Compatibility. Purpose-Built for Live-Cell Internalization Assays The pHSense™ family of europium-labeled, pH-sensitive reagents is designed to simplify and accelerate the study of GPCR and membrane protein internalization in live cells. These reagents are fully compatible with plate-based, no-wash workflows and use time-resolved fluorescence (TRF) to eliminate background noise—delivering clear, quantifiable signals as targets move into acidic intracellular compartments. What Sets pHSense™ Apart ✅ Time-resolved detection minimizes background noise, which enhances detection sensitivity. ✅ No-wash protocol preserves cell integrity and kinetic detection. ✅ High-throughput ready: faster time-to-results and streamlined data acquisition. ✅ Comprehensive validation: validated for GPCRs, but also antibodies and ADCs. ✅ Versatility across suspension and adherent cells The Full GPCR Toolkit by Revvity Every step of the signaling cascade. One trusted source. GPCRs are among the most powerful and complex targets in biomedical research. Revvity offers a comprehensive reagent portfolio to match that complexity—supporting every stage of the signaling pathway, from ligand binding and G-protein activation to intracellular signaling readouts. With formats including TR-FRET, radioligand binding, cAMP, IP-One, and phospho-protein assays (ERK, AKT, CREB, MEK), this toolkit is built for speed, reproducibility, and translational insight. Proprietary no-wash technologies help reduce hands-on time while maintaining exceptional data quality—so you can move fast without compromise. View Reagents Explore Revvity’s GPCR Assay Technologies Tools designed to illuminate every step of GPCR signaling—from binding to downstream response. Ligand binding Measure receptor engagement with high sensitivity using TR-FRET, radioligand, and Fluorescent Tag-lite® formats. G-Protein Activation Quantify Gs, Gi, and Gq activation in real time with cAMP, GTP, and IP-One assays. Arrestin Recruitment Detect β-arrestin recruitment with TR-FRET and luminescence assays tailored for biased signaling studies. Intracellular Signaling Track key downstream events like ERK, AKT, and CREB phosphorylation with high-throughput precision. Build Your GPCR Assay Workflow Meet the Team behind pHSense™ Eric TRINQUET Sr Director Life Sciences Reagents, Revvity Eric Trinquet is a recognized expert in the field of immunoassays and fluorescence technologies. He currently leads Revvity's Research and Development activities, focusing on biochemical and cellular assay platforms related to Life Sciences Reagents. Before joining Revvity, Eric worked for Cisbio Bioassays first as Director of Technological Development and then as R&D Director. His career is marked by significant contributions, from introducing HTRF technology in the field of high-throughput screening to developing innovative solutions such as the IP-One kit for studying G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) and the Tag-lite platform. Elodie DUPUIS R&D Senior project manager, team leader. Elodie Dupuis earned her Master’s degree in biology and biotechnology engineering from the University of Sciences of Nîmes and the Ecole des Mines engineering school (France) in 2009. She then joined Cisbio Bioassays, and later Revvity, as project leader and team manager in the Research & Development department, leading her team on the development of innovative HTRF™ and AlphaLISA™ kits for pharma, biotech, and academic partners. Through her research contributions, she has co-authored numerous scientific publications and holds several patents as an inventor. She has been leading collaborative projects with public research institutes and pharmaceutical companies, most notably the joint Revvity/Institute of Functional Genomics team, EIDOS. In 2020, together with her team, she initiated a long-term research effort that enabled the creation of a new and innovative portfolio for GPCRs, antibody drug conjugates, and several other applications: pHSense™. 2025 marked the commercial launch of the first pHSense products by Revvity. Mathis LAFFENETRE Product Manager, Immunoassay Reagents. Mathis holds a biotechnology engineering degree from the National School of Biomolecule Technology of Bordeaux and an MS in biomedical business management from the Grenoble School of Management. He joined Revvity (then Cisbio) in 2016 as part of the scientific marketing effort to build brand recognition for the HTRF technology and accelerate the company’s reagents use in academic labs, biotech companies, and pharma. In the following years, he held several marketing and strategic positions in France and the US, primarily related to the Immunoassay portfolio. As of 2025, he is part of the Immunoassay & Imaging Reagents Portfolio group as a product manager for the GPCRs, and is responsible for supporting the adoption and expansion of the reagent portfolio into the hands of scientists and researchers. Inside the Science: A Conversation with Revvity's Dr. Eric Trinquet From Rare Earth Probes to Internalization Assays: The pH Sense Story If you’ve ever used HTRF or wondered what goes into making a product worthy of your next experiment, this is your backstage pass. More about this conversation Our Partnership Dr. GPCR Spotlights Revvity’s pHSense™ Reagents for Real-Time GPCR Internalization A new reagent family designed to unlock high-throughput internalization workflows—now featured across the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Boston, MA – September 2025 — Dr. GPCR, the global nonprofit platform dedicated to advancing GPCR research and drug discovery, is proud to spotlight the launch of pHSense™, a new reagent family from Revvity designed to bring unprecedented clarity, speed, and scalability to the study of receptor internalization. Internalization is a core—but often overlooked—dimension of GPCR biology. Traditionally, studying it has meant long workflows, low throughput, or expensive imaging platforms. pHSense™ changes that by combining europium-based, pH-sensitive probes with no-wash, live-cell protocols and TRF-based detection—making it possible to monitor internalization in real time, in standard plate-based assays. “When we saw dose-dependent internalization in endogenous GLP1R cells—without microscopy—that was the turning point,” said Dr. Eric Trinquet, Director of Research and Development at Revvity. “We knew pHSense could offer something truly new to the GPCR field.” A Tool Designed for Real Research Needs Built on more than two decades of GPCR assay innovation, pHSense™ was developed to overcome three persistent barriers in internalization studies: Complexity of imaging-based workflows Lack of scalability for high-throughput screening Difficulty detecting endogenous receptor activity With pHSense™, scientists can finally move beyond proxy readouts and track GPCR internalization as it happens—even at physiological expression levels. All four formats are validated in well-established models like GLP1R and Mu opioid receptor (MOR), and are compatible with HTRF plate readers already used in most labs. Related Articles How Breakthroughs Happen: Eric Trinquet on Innovation, Serendipity & GPCRs Discover how Dr. Eric Trinquet, creator of HTRF and IP-One assays, turned failure into breakthrough tools for GPCR science. Learn why play, serendipity, and partnerships fuel innovation—and how this mindset can transform your research and biotech career. Dr. GPCR Podcast Oct 16, 2025 4 min read The Truth About GPCR Product Launches: Years in the Making What it really takes to launch a GPCR product—years of failure, science, and strategy. Go behind the scenes of pH-Sense with Revity’s Dr. Eric Trinquet. Dr. GPCR Podcast Oct 8, 2025 4 min read Innovative Data-Driven Solutions: The pHSense Revolution A powerful new tool tracks GPCR internalization in native cells—no imaging, no overexpression. Learn how pH Sense changes the game for drug discovery. Dr. GPCR Podcast Sep 26, 2025 3 min read Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Partner Contact Revvity

Articles News Get in Touch Item List This is a Title 01 This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Read More This is a Title 02 This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Read More This is a Title 03 This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Read More Menu • Home • Services • About Ready to collaborate? Let’s talk about how I support GPCR discovery, pharmacology strategy, and cross-functional execution across biotech, VC, and CRO teams. Get in touch ©2023-2025 All rights reserved by FindYooour, LLC & Dr. GPCR Corp Proudly created with Wix.com Connect • LinkedIn • Podcast • Dr. GPCR Ecosystem

Turn GPCR discovery chaos into clarity—Yamina’s Corner offers expert GPCR strategy, CRO guidance, and tailored scientific support to accelerate your pipeline. Home About News Get in Touch Welcome Turn GPCR Chaos Into Insights Expert strategic and scientific consultancy to accelerate your pipeline Book My Consultation Critical Bottlenecks in Your GPCR Pipeline ❌ Overwhelming pharmacology Data ❌ Suboptimal CRO Partnerships ❌ Stalled Pipeline Progression ❌ Uncertainty in GPCR Investments Advisory Focus Areas Expert support for Biotech innovators, VC investors and CRO partners Biotech Pipeline Acceleration For Biotech Leaders & Scientists Actionable Data Insights: Translate complex GPCR pharmacology into clear decisions for lead optimization and candidate selection. Accelerated Program Progression: Design robust assay cascades and establish key go/no-go points to speed up your pipeline. Optimized CRO Collaboration: Streamline internal R&D and external CRO workflows to prevent delays and ensure preclinical success. Fuel Discovery VC Due Diligence & De-risking For Venture Capital Firms De-risk GPCR Investments: Identify critical scientific red flags and technical gaps in GPCR assets before committing capital. Actionable Scientific Validation: Ensure target companies execute the right GPCR pharmacology experiments to generate robust, decision-making data. Clear Platform Assessment: Gain rapid, independent insight into GPCR platform risks and true therapeutic potential to inform investment strategy. Fast-Track Discovery CRO Partnership & Optimization For Contract Research Organizations Elevate Scientific Offerings: Refine and optimize your GPCR assay platforms and in vitro models to deliver superior data quality and results. Enhance Client Project Delivery: Streamline workflows and improve scientific execution to increase client satisfaction and secure repeat business. Differentiate Your Market Position: Showcase your specialized GPCR expertise to stand out from competitors and attract high-value biotech and pharma partners. Power Discovery How We Work: Your Path to GPCR Success 1 Initial Strategic Alignment We begin with a focused discussion of your current GPCR program and critical challenges, identifying precise areas for collaboration. 2 Define Actionable Objectives Together, we clarify specific, measurable goals, from target validation and assay development to CRO selection or portfolio strategy, ensuring a tailored approach. 3 Collaborative Execution & Impact I integrate directly into your discovery process to remove roadblocks, enhance execution, and generate actionable scientific data, driving confident decisions and sustained preclinical progress. Advance My Discovery My Approach: Precision Guidance for GPCR Programs I provide the focused, scientific expertise that accelerates complex GPCR discovery programs, ensuring clarity and de-risking your path from target to candidate. I integrate seamlessly with biotech, VC, and CRO teams as a trusted, objective partner. Integrated Strategic Partnership We collaborate directly with your scientific and leadership teams. This partnership prevents bottlenecks and optimizes resource allocation, ensuring every strategic decision efficiently propels your program forward and aligns with critical business objectives. Biology-First, Data-Driven Solutions Every recommendation is rooted in GPCR biology, pharmacology experience. This provides evidence-based strategies leveraging deep GPCR expertise to overcome specific scientific challenges and maximize your program's potential. Accelerated Preclinical Progression I streamline critical operational processes, from advanced assay design and CRO management to rapid go/no-go decision-making. This focused execution accelerates preclinical milestones and maximizes the efficiency and return on your R&D investment. Core Values: The Foundation of Every Successful Partnership My advisory is built on principles that ensure clarity, minimize risk, and drive enduring results in GPCR drug discovery. Scientific Integrity Every recommendation is rigorously evidence-based, not reliant on assumptions. This ensures robust, defensible decisions that de-risk your program from early discovery to regulatory milestones. Operational Discipline I instill structure and consistency across every phase of your discovery process. This approach eliminates inefficiencies and standardizes workflows, accelerating your path to a preclinical candidate. Collaborative Partnership I operate as an embedded, invested partner with your team. Your program's success is my priority, fostering a transparent, results-driven environment that maximizes collective expertise and accelerates progress. About Yamina A. Berchiche I'm Yamina A. Berchiche, and I understand the intricate challenges of GPCR drug discovery. Small missteps can derail entire programs: underperforming assays, off-track CROs, and data that fails to drive decisions. That's precisely where my expertise becomes your strategic advantage. With over two decades dedicated to GPCR pharmacology across biotech, academia, and the non-profit sector, I bring unparalleled scientific depth and operational precision to every project. My work focuses on integrating directly with your team as a strategic partner. Whether it's optimizing CRO selection, building robust internal capabilities, or translating complex data into decisive program advancements, I help you eliminate friction, align efforts, and accelerate your path to success. As the founder of Dr. GPCR, I also offer a unique, broad perspective and trusted relationships within the field. This allows me to connect you with critical insights and key collaborators, further accelerating your progress in GPCR drug discovery. Let's Talk Discovery What Partners Say Here’s what it’s like to work together — from people I’ve supported on both sides of the bench. Anne Marie Quinn, CEO Montana Molecular As a CRO, we were delivering high-quality data across complex biotech programs, but translating that data into aligned, timely decisions across stakeholders wasn’t always straightforward. After partnering with her, communication became clearer, deliverables were better defined, and collaboration across teams ran more smoothly. She helped streamline complex projects and made the CRO–client relationship more effective and productive. Terry Kenakin, PhD UNC Chappel Hill In complex pharmacological discovery programs, scientific ambiguity and fragmented execution can quietly erode progress. Yamina brings the clarity, rigor, and structured decision-making that keeps programs on track. Across multiple discovery efforts, she established clear decision gates and alignment across teams, materially strengthening candidate progression and prioritization. Her involvement consistently elevates both the scientific discipline and the quality of portfolio-level decisions. Murat Tunaboylu, CEO Antiverse Before engaging Yamina, our team faced hurdles navigating complex early discovery decisions. We had critical program choices ahead and needed clearer direction. Bringing her in marked a meaningful shift. We made confident progress on a pivotal program and gained clarity on our next strategic focus. Yamina was instrumental in unifying our scientific and operational teams, strengthening alignment and driving momentum across execution. Abishek Iyer, CEO Ashta Therapeutics Before working with Yamina, we had solid internal momentum but needed to better align our biology, assay priorities, and compound strategy into a cohesive, decision-driven plan. Her input helped us structure the screening funnel, define clear go/no-go criteria, and integrate ADME and mechanistic assays in a way that reflected both biological rationale and operational realities. She has been a true thought partner — not only on tactical execution, but on pressure-testing hypotheses, challenging assumptions, and maintaining disciplined forward progress. Book Book My 30 Minutes Strategy Call Menu Home Services About News Ready to collaborate? Let’s talk about how I support GPCR discovery, pharmacology strategy, and cross-functional execution across biotech, VC, and CRO teams. 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GPCR desensitization in health and disease: homologous and heterologous mechanisms, regulation of the desensitization machinery, and therapeutic efficacy. < Back to Courses GPCR Desensitization in Health and Disease October 22, 2026 10 AM - 11:30 AM EST 🔒 Watch Recordings - Join Premium Access the full library of recorded Masterclass sessions. Get Live Updates Be notified when new live Masterclasses are scheduled. Introduction Desensitization limits the duration and magnitude of GPCR signaling, and the machinery that carries it out is itself subject to regulation. This Masterclass examines the basic mechanisms of receptor desensitization and the mechanistic differences between homologous and heterologous desensitization. It then addresses how post-translational modifications regulate the desensitization machinery and alter its function. Coverage extends to the current state of GPCR desensitization in health and disease, including how certain therapeutics deleteriously regulate this machinery, the consequences for therapeutic efficacy, and strategies to overcome them. Intended for scientists with a working knowledge of GPCR pharmacology whose work involves receptor regulation, loss of response, or sustained therapeutic efficacy. Instructor Adriano Marchese's research examines how GPCR signaling is regulated by β-arrestin-dependent and β-arrestin-independent pathways, with the goal of identifying and targeting novel aspects of GPCR signaling for therapeutic development. He is Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. His interest in GPCRs is longstanding. During his graduate work at the University of Toronto, where he earned his M.Sc . and Ph.D. in Pharmacology, he worked on the cloning and characterization of genes encoding GPCRs. As a postdoctoral fellow at Thomas Jefferson University, he investigated the mechanisms that regulate GPCR trafficking. His Masterclass brings this mechanistic view of receptor regulation to the question of how desensitization shapes GPCR signaling in health and disease. 🔒 Watch Recordings - Join Premium Access the full library of recorded Masterclass sessions. Get Live Updates Be notified when new live Masterclasses are scheduled.

Discover the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem – the ultimate hub for GPCR professionals to connect, collaborate, and advance drug discovery. Home: About The global hub for GPCR science Accelerating GPCR drug discovery, together Where academia and industry meet to advance GPCR research, share knowledge, and foster collaboration across the entire ecosystem. For scientists University Your professional home in GPCR science. Live masterclasses, curated research intelligence, and a community that keeps you connected and ahead. ➔ Live masterclasses with leading researchers ➔ Weekly GPCR research intelligence ➔ Members-only networking & AMAs Explore University For industry Foundry Reach the GPCR research community where they already learn and collaborate. Strategic partnerships, visibility programs, and curated service directories. ➔ Yearly Glow strategic media partnerships ➔ CRO Bank curated service directory ➔ Direct access to 1,400+ GPCR scientists Explore Foundry 1,400+ GPCR scientists reached 200+ Expert talks & masterclasses 180+ Podcast Episodes Strategic Partner(s) Closing the gap between academia and industry Dr. GPCR is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit empowering the GPCR field through shared knowledge, collaboration, and open access to tools that accelerate drug discovery. 🤝 Support the Mission

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Discover CRO Bank Packages with Dr. GPCR Ecosystem. List your services and your brand on the world's first GPCR CRO Bank. Reach a targeted scientific audience and showcase your organization in the GPCR community. Be Discoverable When GPCR Teams Are Actively Evaluating Services and Tools The GPCR CRO Bank is designed to help service providers and tool companies get found, evaluated, and contacted — not just recognized. Companies present their services in a structured format so GPCR discovery teams can quickly identify relevant capabilities. Curated for quality Reach 1,400+ GPCR researchers Partner with us Today! Who the GPCR CRO Bank is For? Your structured home within the ecosystem The GPCR CRO Bank is a strong fit for companies that want to: Make their services or products easily discoverable within the GPCR ecosystem Present clear, structured product and service offerings in one trusted location Support inbound inquiries from teams actively evaluating CROs, platforms, or tools Use ecosystem visibility to support commercial conversations and decision-making If your primary goal is brand credibility and long-term recognition across high-traffic ecosystem pages, a Strategic Media Partnership may be a better fit. "Dr. GPCR is the world's largest nonprofit community focused on GPCRs. We are building the world's first CRO Service-focused GPCR bank. As a CRO partner, you'll gain trusted access to an engaged audience of biotech teams and drug discovery innovators — without having to fight for attention." Why Partner with Dr. GPCR? Featured across our nonprofit platform, trusted by thousands As a CRO partner, you'll be featured across our nonprofit platform, trusted by thousands of GPCR scientists and biotech professionals. Reach Qualified Researchers Connect with scientists who are actively looking for tools like yours, without the noise of general platforms. Build Trust Develop content that speaks their language and establishes your credibility in the GPCR research community. Join a Curated Ecosystem Become part of a collaborative, curated ecosystem — not just another name on a crowded vendor list. What You Get as a CRO Partner? Built for discovery and evaluation These channels are used to support discovery and evaluation — helping teams understand what you offer and how to engage with you. Premium Licenses 10 Scientists Premium Accounts and 3 Non-Scientists Premium Accounts for your team. Custom Company Page Permanent company profile on the Dr. GPCR Ecosystem with your logo, branding, mission description, contact links, and key highlights. Featured Podcast Episode Be the guest on a dedicated Dr. GPCR Podcast episode. Feature up to 3 team members. Distributed across podcast platforms and social media. Blog Contributions Contribute to blog posts as a valued partner. Share insights on product launches, scientific discoveries, or customer stories. Product or Service Pages Individual pages for each product or service. Educate researchers and showcase technical value. Provide downloadable resources or use cases. Newsletter Visibility Featured in our highly read weekly newsletter. Tell your story with context, clarity, and purpose. Bonus: mentioned in podcast intros/outros. Social Media Promotion Engaging posts about your organization targeted to GPCR researchers and biotech professionals. Shared on LinkedIn and X (Twitter). Co-Branded Events & Training Collaborate on webinars and virtual training sessions to showcase your expertise and engage directly with the GPCR research community. Previous Partners Join these leading organizations Join these leading organizations in the GPCR research ecosystem. Book Ready to share your CRO company with the GPCR world? Book a 30-minute Strategy Call with Yamina to explore whether your capabilities fit within the GPCR CRO Bank.

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Join the Dr. GPCR Affiliate Program and earn commissions by helping connect the global GPCR community. Share our ecosystem, courses, and events to advance drug discovery together. Dr. GPCR Affiliate Program Earn by Empowering the GPCR Ecosystem Help us connect scientists, founders, and innovators while earning commissions for every member, partner, or course you bring into the Dr. GPCR community. Become our Brand Ambassador Our vision is to build the best platform for the GPCR community and help you the scientists and business owners to share their experiences with others, get help, and find the perfect tools, colleagues, build their strategy and advance our field. As an ambassador, with the Affiliate Program, you'll earn a commission whenever your referral link is used and a qualified purchase has been made by your friends, colleagues, or followers who are also part of the GPCR field. 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Advance your GPCR research with expert-led Masterclasses on pharmacology, efficacy, signaling, and drug discovery. Built for serious scientists. University / Masterclass On Demand Every Masterclass session. Anytime. At your pace. The full recording library of GPCR Masterclass sessions — revisit the science, catch what you missed, and explore topics at the depth they deserve. On-demand recordings are included inDr. GPCR University Try it for 14 days Recording library Explore the Masterclass library Full recordings of every Masterclass session. Filter by category, level, or instructor to find exactly what you need. Filter by Category Filter by Level Filter by Instructor Watch Now Davide Calebiro The spatiotemporal organization of GPCR signalling Watch Now Sudarshan Rajagopal The Spatiotemporal Revolution in GPCR Biology Watch Now Bryan Roth GPCR Molecular Glues: Biased Modulation at the Receptor–Transducer Interface Watch Now Jakob Höppner Subcellular PTH1R Regulation: Lessons from Rare Disease Watch Now Sam Hoare How Signaling Kinetics Shapes GPCR Drug Action Watch Now Kenneth A. Jacobson, Matteo Pavan Structure-Based Design of Modulators of Purinergic GPCRs Watch Now Andrew Tobin How to Build Breakthrough GPCR Programs Watch Now Terry Hebert GPCR Signaling in iPSC-Derived Cardiac Disease Models Watch Now Terry Kenakin Assessing Bias: The Practical Approach 1 2 3 1 ... 1 2 3 ... 3 The scientists Learn from world leaders in GPCR research Every session is led by a recognized expert with decades of experience in GPCR pharmacology and drug discovery. Adriano Marchese Medical College of Wisconsin Bryan Roth UNC Chapel Hill Medical School Dmitry Veprintsev University of Nottingham Kenneth Jacobson NIH Matteo Pavan NIH Sudarshan Rajagopal Duke University School of Medicine Terry Kenakin Terry's Corner Andrew Tobin University of Glasgow Davide Calebiro University of Birmingham Jakob Höppner Endocrine Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School Marsha Pierce Midwestern University Samuel Hoare Pharmechanics LLC Terry Hébert McGill University Yamina Berchiche Dr. GPCR & Yamina's Corner How it works? Your library. Your pace. 1 Browse or search Filter by scientific category, instructor, or level. Find the session that matches what you're working on right now. 2 Watch at your pace Full recordings with no time limits. Pause, rewind, revisit. The science is here whenever you need it. 3 Go deeper Join the next live Masterclass to ask your questions directly. The recordings are the foundation — the live sessions are where you go further. Want to be in the room live? Live Masterclass sessions run regularly with interactive Q&A. See what's coming up next. See live sessions → What others are saying I am a convert! I will keep Dr. GPCR and the offered resources in my work sphere Dr. Hoare is very experienced in the field. What came as a pleasant surprise was how didactical and well-thought-out his course was—highly recommended. The really unexpected was that the Q&A sessions reached the highest level—beyond excellent. GPCR researcher Thank you for bringing this course with Dr. Kenakin. I wish Dr. GPCR the best for the sake of promoting more educational opportunities that are sorely needed in the field GPCR researcher The content had enough depth to satisfy the hunger for theory while being full of practical knowledge GPCR researcher The best pharmacology teacher teaming up with the best GPCR community platform to help train and inspire the next generation of scientists. Also super-valuable for those of us learning how to teach pharmacology GPCR researcher Dr. Hoare's extensive and elaborative explanation of the topics at hand was excellent and very digestible. Thoroughly enjoyed learning from him GPCR researcher Dr. Kenakin is a leading expert in the field. Aside from his vast experience in drug development, not to mention his extensive publication record, Dr. Kenakin is a masterful teacher and communicator. GPCR researcher About the GPCR Masterclass What is a GPCR Masterclass? The GPCR Masterclass is a live scientific discussion with a leading expert in GPCR pharmacology, receptor biology, or drug discovery. Sessions focus on research questions, experimental interpretation, and emerging challenges in GPCR science. Are the sessions live or recorded? Masterclass sessions are conducted live with an invited expert. After the event, recordings are added to the Masterclass course library, where Premium Members can access them on demand. Who should join? The Masterclass is designed for GPCR researchers, pharmacologists, and drug discovery scientists working in academia, biotech, and pharmaceutical research. Can I watch sessions later if I miss the live event? Yes. All sessions are recorded and available in the Masterclass course library for Premium Members. Can I watch sessions later if I miss the live event? Yes. All sessions are recorded and available in the Masterclass course library for Premium Members. How do I fit this in my schedule? You can attend the live discussion or watch the recording later. The Masterclass library allows members to revisit sessions at any time. What makes the Masterclass different from reading papers or textbooks? The Masterclass focuses on scientific interpretation and discussion. Experts explain how they think about pharmacological data, experimental design, and discovery challenges—insight that is rarely captured in publications. What happens during the live discussion? Each session begins with a focused presentation from the guest expert, followed by moderated discussion and questions from participants. The format allows deeper exploration of pharmacology concepts than typical conference presentations. 200+ sessions are waiting for you inside University The full on-demand library, plus live Masterclasses, premium intelligence, jobs, events, and a community of GPCR scientists — all in one place. See what it feels like... Try University for 14 days — $50

A conversation with Prof. David Hodson on visualizing GLP-1 and GIP receptors in pancreatic islets and brain circuits to advance GPCR-targeted therapies for diabetes and obesity. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Visualizing GLP-1 & GIP Receptors in Islets and Brain In this episode, Professor David Hodson discusses how GLP-1 and GIP receptors regulate metabolism across the pancreas and brain, and why visualizing receptor localization and signaling in real tissues is essential for advancing GPCR drug discovery . His team develops fluorescence-based and chemically engineered tools to study gpcr internalization and ligand engagement in intact islets and neuronal circuits — insights that inform next-generation functional assay development and translational therapeutic design. The conversation also highlights the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in accelerating innovation in diabetes and obesity research. Why this matters How receptor distribution in islets and brain circuits shapes incretin hormone drug effects Why visualization tools changed our understanding of GPCR signaling in metabolic tissues What collaborative chemistry enabled in designing receptor-targeted fluorescent ligands The moment when structural and imaging evidence clarified unexpected glucagon-derived peptide behavior How future metabolic therapies may evolve based on receptor cross-talk and tissue-specific engagement Who should listen Navigated complex datasets where interpretation depended on biological context Balanced innovation with the need for reproducible, well-controlled functional assays Worked across disciplines where chemistry, pharmacology, and physiology converge Questioned how drug action differs in real tissues vs. recombinant cell lines …this episode will resonate. About David Hodson Prof. David Hodson is the Robert Turner Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the University of Oxford , working within the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism. Originally trained as a Veterinary Surgeon , he completed postdoctoral research at the CNRS in Montpellier before establishing his independent laboratory at Imperial College London as a Diabetes UK RD Lawrence Fellow. He later served as Professor of Cellular Metabolism and Institute Deputy Director at the University of Birmingham. His group develops imaging and chemical biology tools to reveal how GLP-1 and GIP receptors operate within complex tissues, with direct relevance to type 2 diabetes and obesity therapy . David Hodson on the Web Radcliffe Department of Medicine Islet Biology Lab University of Birmingham Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Dr. Richard Premont About Dr. Richard Premont "Dr. Premont obtained his B.S. in Biology and Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1985, and M.Ph . and Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Pharmacology) at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (City University of New York) in 1990 and 1992, working with Ravi Iyengar on regulation/desensitization of the liver glucagon receptor and glucagon-stimulated adenylyl cyclase system. In 1992, he won a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship to support his post-doctoral work with Robert Lefkowitz and Marc Caron at Duke University. His initial project to identify and clone taste receptors was unsuccessful, but led to the identification of GRK5 and continued focus on GRKs (particularly GRKs 4,5,6) and arrestins as GPCR regulators and as mediators of distinct signaling pathways through partners including GIT1. In 1999, obtained an independent faculty position at Duke in Gastroenterology, where he remained until 2018 studying GPCRs and their signaling pathways in the liver and in liver disease. In 2018, he moved to Harrington Discovery Institute and Case Western Reserve University, where he studies GPCR regulation by S-nitrosylation. My research focus is on understanding how distinct cellular signaling pathways interact and are coordinated to produce integrated physiological responses, and how dysregulation of this coordination results in pathophysiology. For this, we have worked in three main areas: the regulation of G protein-coupled receptor signaling particularly by the G protein-coupled receptor kinase (GRK) – beta-arrestin system, the coordination of heterotrimeric G protein, small GTP-binding protein and protein kinase pathways by GIT/PIX scaffolding complexes during cellular signaling, and characterizing the role of protein S-nitrosylation as a signaling post-translational modification in mediating and regulating cellular signaling pathways, particularly in conjunction with better characterized signaling systems. In our work, we utilize methods including structural biology and proteomics, molecular biology and biochemical enzymology, primary and model cell culture, and transgenic, knockout, knock-in and conditional models of mouse physiology and behavior." Dr. Richard Premont on the web Google Scholar LinkedIn Dr. GPCR Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

Dr. Jennifer Pluznick explains why olfactory receptors in the kidney are more than curiosities — they sense gut-microbe metabolites, modulate blood pressure, and are forcing a rethink of what "smell" actually means. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Jennifer Pluznick: Olfactory Receptors in the Kidney and the Gut-Microbe Signal Olfactory receptors are known by a single address — the nose. But a microarray Dr. Jennifer Pluznick ran as a postdoctoral fellow placed them, surprisingly, at the top of a kidney gene expression list. She almost dismissed the result as an artifact. Instead, she followed it, and the decision has shaped the direction of her lab at Johns Hopkins ever since. In this conversation, Dr. Pluznick explores what changes when olfactory receptors are treated not as smell receptors but as general-purpose chemosensors — scattered across the body and tuned to ligands circulating in the blood. She walks through the kidney ORs her group has connected to renin release, to proximal tubule glucose handling, and to blood pressure regulation. One of those receptors is activated by small-molecule metabolites produced by gut microbes, a finding she still calls mind-blowing and that she continues to unpack. The conversation also surfaces the field's quiet bottlenecks: the trafficking problem that traps ORs in the ER, the orthology gap between 1,000 mouse receptors and 350 human ones, and the reagents — antibodies, agonists, antagonists — that the community still does not have. About the Guest Dr. Jennifer Pluznick is Associate Professor of Physiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her lab studies the role of understudied GPCRs — olfactory receptors, taste receptors, and orphan GPRs — in kidney physiology. Her group has linked specific kidney olfactory receptors to blood pressure regulation via the renin-angiotensin pathway, to glucose handling in the proximal tubule, and to circulating metabolites generated by the gut microbiota. She first encountered olfactory receptors in the kidney during her postdoctoral training, and her lab continues to deorphanize and functionally characterize them today. Scientific Themes of the Conversation Olfactory receptors as general-purpose chemosensors outside the nose Deorphanization strategies for kidney-expressed GPCRs The renin-angiotensin axis and OR-mediated blood pressure control Gut microbiota metabolites as endogenous GPCR ligands Receptor trafficking and the ER-retention problem for ectopically expressed ORs Mouse-to-human orthology in a highly expanded receptor family Key Insights from the Conversation A surprise at the top of a microarray. When Dr. Pluznick's postdoc screen flagged olfactory receptors as top hits in a kidney disease cell line, her first instinct was to distrust the data. A single comment from her advisor — olfactory receptors in the kidney could actually be really cool — reframed a possible artifact as a research program. Reframing olfactory receptors as chemosensors. The name "olfactory receptor" narrows the imagination. Dr. Pluznick argues they are better understood as chemical sensors that happen to dominate the nose. Once reframed that way, ectopic expression in tissues like the kidney stops seeming strange and starts making sense. Two kidney ORs with physiology attached. One OR her lab has studied modulates renin release and therefore blood pressure; another regulates glucose handling through a transporter family that includes a validated type 2 diabetes target. Both started as receptors with no known ligand, no known localization, and no reason to expect physiological relevance. Gut microbes at the other end of the signal. The OR linked to blood pressure is activated by small-molecule metabolites produced by gut bacteria at low millimolar circulating concentrations. That makes blood pressure regulation, in part, a readout of microbial metabolism — a connection Dr. Pluznick describes as something that still blows her mind. Trafficking as a field-wide bottleneck. Exogenously expressed ORs tend to get stuck in the ER. Matsunami's RTP1S chaperone, the Rho tag, and the Pluznick lab's Lucy tag — a cleavable leucine-rich signal sequence developed by a rotation student — each help, but no combination fully solves the problem for every OR. The trafficking failure itself may encode something about how tightly ORs are regulated in olfactory sensory neurons. The orthology gap. Mice have ~1,000 olfactory receptors; humans have ~350. Sequence-based orthology calls are often ambiguous, and in the Pluznick lab's hands, putative orthologs frequently fail to share ligand profiles. Finding functional orthologs — not just sequence matches — is non-trivial, and it matters for anyone hoping to translate kidney OR biology into a human drug. Follow the data that surprises you. Dr. Pluznick's advice to early-career scientists is shaped by her own near-dismissal of an inconvenient microarray result. Established assumptions about where a receptor "belongs" are often what stop a discovery from being recognized as one. Episode Timeline Timestamps were generated using AI for readability. 00:00 Opening: newsletter, season close, and welcome 02:13 Becoming a scientist as a first-gen college student 04:17 The case for chasing understudied GPCRs in the kidney 06:18 "Olfactory receptors will always be my first love" 08:45 Renin, blood pressure, and a glucose-handling receptor 12:14 Localization and ligand screening when there's no antibody 17:06 What happens to OR expression in a disease kidney 19:56 The orthology problem: 1,000 mouse ORs, 350 human ones 23:08 RTP1S, the Rho tag, and the Lucy tag 29:20 One-neuron-one-receptor and the tight regulation of smell 36:57 The aha moment: gut microbes, a GPCR, and blood pressure 39:58 Diversity as everyone's responsibility Selected Quotes "I famously said that I wasn't sure I could really trust the data because these crazy receptors came out as the top hits. But my postdoc advisor, who's much wiser than I, said, 'olfactory receptors in the kidney, though — that could be really cool.' And somehow when he said it, it sounded like a much better idea." "Olfactory receptors as a class will always be my first love in terms of GPCRs." "Your blood pressure regulation is somehow tied to the activity of your gut microbes. And that is something that still kind of blows my mind." "You need to follow your data, even when it surprises you, even when it might go against what you assumed to be true before you started the experiment." About this episode Dr. Pluznick discovered that olfactory receptors in mice are also expressed in their kidneys and blood vessels. Her research is focused on the role of chemosensory GPCRs in regulating renal and cardiovascular function, and identifying renal/cardiovascular olfactory receptor ligands, and relating them to whole-animal physiology. This work contributes to a better understanding of how the kidney helps maintain homeostasis in humans. Jennifer is currently an assistant professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degree in biology from Truman State University and earned her Ph.D. in renal physiology from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She then spent five years training as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Michael Caplan at Yale University, where she studied both renal physiology and sensory biology systems and focused on olfaction. Dr. Jennifer Pluznick on the web John Hopkins Pluznick Lab Pubmed Ted Talk Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Dr. GPCR Team About Dr. Yamina Berchiche Dr. Yamina A. Berchiche is the founder of Dr. GPCR, an ecosystem designed to bring together stakeholders interested in using G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) that control virtually everything in the body as drug targets. The mission of Dr. GPCR is to accelerate GPCR drug discovery by sharing the latest research and technology advances in the field and providing exposure to scientists through the Dr. GPCR podcast. Dr. Berchiche obtained her Master’s and Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Montreal in Canada before training at Rockefeller University in New York and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She developed expertise over the past two decades studying structure/function relationships of GPCRs using live-cell bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET). Her work focused on chemokine receptors, members of the GPCR family that control cell movement in the body. Dr. Yamina Berchiche on the web Website LinkedIn Facebook Twitter ResearchGate PubMed Google Scholar Dr. GPCR About Dr. Shivani Sachdev Dr. Sachdev is an early career researcher in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Her research centers on developing nanobody-ligand conjugates to target GPCRs, with a focus on receptors relevant for treating osteoporosis, diabetes, and pain. She received her undergraduate degree in Biotechnology from KIIT University in India. She subsequently joined Professor Mark Connor's laboratory at Macquarie University in Australia. Dr. Sachdev pursued Ph.D. in the same lab where she investigated the molecular pharmacology of cannabinoid receptors. She is also very active within the pharmacology community and currently serves on the editorial board of the British Journal of Pharmacology. Given her expertise in GPCR pharmacology and scientific communication, she is poised to make valuable contributions to the field and expand our understanding of GPCR signaling. Dr. Shivani Sachdev on the web NIDDK ReseachGate Google Scholar LinkedIn Twitter Dr. GPCR About Dr. Inês Pinheiro PharmD by training and Ph.D. candidate in Hartley's lab at the University of Geneva. As a young researcher fascinated by chemokine receptors, molecular pharmacology, drug discovery, and immuno-oncology. Dr. Inês Pinheiro on the web LinkedIn University of Geneva Twitter Dr. GPCR About Dr. Monserrat Avila Zozaya I did a PhD in cell biology at CINVESTAV, Mexico. During that time, I investigated the effect of lung cancer-related mutations in the GAIN domain of the Latrophilin 3 receptor. My long-term interest is focused on understanding the mechanisms mediated by GPCRs at the cellular communication level. Dr. Monserrat Avila Zozaya on the web LinkedIn Antony Boucard Lab Dr. GPCR About John Azietaku John Teye Azietaku,PhD is a trained pharmacist, holding a Ph.D. in Drug Discovery Biology and Pharmacology from Monash University. Currently serving as a Post Doctoral research fellow at Monash University, John plays a pivotal role in the pharmacological screening of compounds for a commercial drug discovery program. With prior industry experience as a Clinical Research Associate at IQVIA and regulatory officer at the Food and Drug Authority (FDA) in Ghana, John has a proven track record of ensuring compliance with protocols and regulatory standards. Driven by a passion for advancing drug development, John is committed to leveraging his expertise to enhance healthcare outcomes and contribute to the growth of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. John Azietaku on the web LinkedIn Dr. GPCR About Ya-Tzu Li Ya-Tzu is a Master's student at the University of South Florida, utilizing large-scale virtual drug screening to identify agonists and antagonists targeting Class A GPCRs. Since beginning her undergraduate studies, she has used computational methods like molecular dynamics simulations and free energy landscape analysis to understand the signaling pathways and activation mechanisms of the Dopamine D3 receptor and the CXCR4-CXCL12 complex. In August, Ya-Tzu will continue her academic and research pursuits by beginning her PhD training in Medical Science at USF, aiming to further contribute to the field of medical pharmacology. Ya-Tzu Li on the web LinkedIn Dr. GPCR About Cam Sinh Lu Cam Sinh Lu is a PhD student at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University, with a deep interest in understanding drug-receptor interactions. With an immense passion for molecular pharmacology, his research focuses on elucidating the molecular basis of membrane protein signalling using quantitative assays and molecular modelling. Further down the track, he aims to apply this knowledge to develop novel chemical treatments for neuronal and cardiovascular diseases. Cam Sinh Lu on the web LinkedIn Dr. GPCR Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. 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Dr. GPCR Podcast - The Voice of the Community Whether you’re a scientist, student, or just curious, you’ll hear about discoveries, career stories, and the latest GPCR news. Jump in and get inspired! Strategic Partners Latest Podcast Episodes Select by Guest Name 2026-09-09 2026-05-13 2026-03-18 2026-02-04 2026-06-10 2026-04-29 2026-03-04 2025-12-17 2026-05-27 2026-04-01 2026-02-18 2025-12-03 1 2 3 4 5 1 ... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ... 16 Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player Listen and subscribe where you get your podcasts

Dr. Terry Hebert on why challenge trials weren't ready, what it takes to hold a GPCR signaling lab together during a pandemic, and the BRET-based beta-1 adrenergic paper that landed in lockdown. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Dr. Terry Hebert: A Pharmacologist Thinking Through Lockdown This resilience conversation with Dr. Terry Hebert was recorded in spring 2020, when Montreal was the national epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and every non-essential bench in the country was shut. The discussion moves across three scientific registers: the practical mechanics of holding a GPCR signaling lab together remotely; the continuity of receptor pharmacology work already in the pipeline before the shutdown, including a newly accepted BRET-based platform for beta-1 adrenergic receptor signaling built with the Bouvier lab; and a pharmacologist's reasoning about the then-unresolved question of whether human challenge trials were an ethical shortcut to a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Dr. Hebert's argument — that challenge trials depend on a reliable therapeutic the field did not yet have — sits at the intersection of drug discovery logic and public health ethics, and illustrates how GPCR scientists reason about pharmacology problems well outside their primary receptor. For Dr. Hebert, the conversation is also about what he had to let go of: the assumption that a lab, once built, runs on its own inertia. About the Guest Dr. Terry Hebert is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, where his lab studies G protein-coupled receptor signaling. His research spans BRET-based assay platforms for characterizing signaling downstream of specific GPCRs, the transcriptional regulation of signaling components as an underappreciated axis of pharmacological modulation, and long-running collaborations on beta-adrenergic receptor biology with the Bouvier lab and others. His work is grounded in careful assay development and a conviction that the signaling space around a receptor is richer than single-pathway readouts suggest. Scientific Themes of the Conversation Lab continuity during institutional shutdown — What it takes to maintain scientific output when the physical lab is closed and every operation has to happen remotely. BRET platforms for GPCR signaling — The role of resonance-energy-transfer-based assays in capturing signaling downstream of specific receptors, with the beta-1 adrenergic receptor as a worked example. Challenge trials and the therapeutic floor — Why the ethics of accelerating vaccine trials depend on having an adequate treatment for the disease under study. Vaccine development at scale — How to read a landscape of 90+ parallel vaccine candidates without confusing breadth of effort for probability of success. Mentorship under isolation — The practical and emotional work of keeping graduate students — especially international students far from their families — connected to a lab that has gone quiet. Pandemic preparedness as a scientific failure — The gap between what infectious disease researchers had been warning about and what institutions were actually ready to do. Key Insights from the Conversation Challenge trials don't work without a reliable drug. Dr. Hebert's core pharmacology argument is that proposing a challenge trial — where volunteers receive placebo or active virus — is ethically unworkable without a therapeutic that can rescue the ones who get sick. His position is that the drug problem has to be solved, or at least bounded, before the vaccine trial design can responsibly change. 90 vaccine candidates is a number about effort, not probability. The conversation pushes against the comfort of large numbers. A field running 90 parallel vaccine trials is a field hedging under uncertainty, not a field with 90 independent chances of success. Dr. Hebert is hopeful but careful about the distinction. BRET platforms carry work forward when the lab can't. The beta-1 adrenergic receptor paper — a BRET-based platform for capturing downstream signaling, built with the Bouvier lab — illustrates how assay-development projects remain productive when benchwork stops. The experimental data was in hand before the shutdown; the intellectual work of writing, reviewing, and revising kept going regardless. A lab is a social infrastructure, not just a physical one. Weekly Monday lab meetings, Friday journal clubs, daily Slack and Zoom contact, a faculty-vs-student trivia night — the lab's continuity came from translating routines, not suspending them. The most fragile link in the system was the isolation of international students away from their families. Reopening is a puzzle about labs, not benches. The hardest logistical problem isn't social distancing within a single lab — it's social distancing between labs sharing a floor, shared equipment, and a public transit system that funnels everyone through the same bottleneck. The warnings were there. Dr. Hebert's reflection on preparedness is quiet but pointed: the scientific community had been warning about this for years. The failure wasn't epistemic — it was institutional. And that failure is what will cost the most, borne hardest by the people least cushioned against it. The next one is coming. The most forward-looking moment in the conversation is also the most sober. This disease, for all its damage, is survivable for most people. The next one might not be. The open question is whether the system will have learned anything by then. Episode Timeline Timestamps were generated using AI for readability. 00:00 Welcome and Dr. GPCR Summit 2020 announcement 01:49 Check-in with Dr. Hebert — shutdown, reopening plans, and Montreal as epicenter 03:06 Paper acceptances, thesis writing, and 30 hours of Zoom teaching in one month 04:29 The beta-1 adrenergic BRET paper and a review on transcriptional regulation as a drug target 05:22 Lab meetings, journal clubs, and the Slack/Zoom scaffolding 06:12 Student wellbeing and the puzzle of reopening a shared floor 07:16 Why challenge trials aren't ready — and the remdesivir question underneath them 08:52 When pandemic infrastructure breaks down at national scale 10:16 Lessons for the next one, and the shape of the new normal Selected Quotes "So we made a decision a month and a half ago to kind of stop going to the lab. Montreal being the epicenter of the disease in this country — we don't regret that decision now." "I don't think [challenge trials] are a good idea because we don't really have good drugs to deal with the disease when people get sick. If we have a way to control the disease and keep people from getting really sick, I think we can go to challenge trials more rapidly." "Honestly it could be worse, right? This disease, most people survive. When the next one comes, let's hope we learn something from this one." "Those are the people we have to protect, not big corporations who, you know, are probably in a sense part of the cause. Globalization is not something that is without its consequences here." About this episode Dr. Terry Hébert is a Professor within the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics at McGill University. Much of his work is based on GPCR signaling in the context to cardiovascular diseases. In this special episode of the Dr.GPCR podcast , we re-connected with Dr. Terry Hebert to chat about how he and his team has been adapting to the new reality of working remotely. Terry tells us about the importance of adapting, communicating, and being mindful of those around us. Dr. Terry Hébert on the web Terry Hébert | Institute of Health Sciences Education Hébert Lab LinkedIn Hébert Lab The GPCR Consortium PubMed Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Dr. Richard Premont About Dr. Richard Premont "Dr. Premont obtained his B.S. in Biology and Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1985, and M.Ph . and Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Pharmacology) at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (City University of New York) in 1990 and 1992, working with Ravi Iyengar on regulation/desensitization of the liver glucagon receptor and glucagon-stimulated adenylyl cyclase system. In 1992, he won a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship to support his post-doctoral work with Robert Lefkowitz and Marc Caron at Duke University. His initial project to identify and clone taste receptors was unsuccessful, but led to the identification of GRK5 and continued focus on GRKs (particularly GRKs 4,5,6) and arrestins as GPCR regulators and as mediators of distinct signaling pathways through partners including GIT1. In 1999, obtained an independent faculty position at Duke in Gastroenterology, where he remained until 2018 studying GPCRs and their signaling pathways in the liver and in liver disease. In 2018, he moved to Harrington Discovery Institute and Case Western Reserve University, where he studies GPCR regulation by S-nitrosylation. My research focus is on understanding how distinct cellular signaling pathways interact and are coordinated to produce integrated physiological responses, and how dysregulation of this coordination results in pathophysiology. For this, we have worked in three main areas: the regulation of G protein-coupled receptor signaling particularly by the G protein-coupled receptor kinase (GRK) – beta-arrestin system, the coordination of heterotrimeric G protein, small GTP-binding protein and protein kinase pathways by GIT/PIX scaffolding complexes during cellular signaling, and characterizing the role of protein S-nitrosylation as a signaling post-translational modification in mediating and regulating cellular signaling pathways, particularly in conjunction with better characterized signaling systems. In our work, we utilize methods including structural biology and proteomics, molecular biology and biochemical enzymology, primary and model cell culture, and transgenic, knockout, knock-in and conditional models of mouse physiology and behavior." Dr. Richard Premont on the web Google Scholar LinkedIn Dr. GPCR Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

Five scientists audit what AI can and can't do for GPCR drug discovery — from orphan receptors and biased signaling to the true-negatives problem nobody writes into grant proposals. Recorded at the 3rd EARNEST meeting. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) EARNEST Panel: Can AI Accelerate GPCR Drug Discovery? In October 2020, five scientists gathered virtually at the 3rd EARNEST meeting to debate a question that has only grown more urgent: can artificial intelligence actually accelerate GPCR drug discovery, or is it mostly a rebranding of methods the field has used for decades? Panelists from InterAx Biotech, Rockefeller University, and the University of New Mexico — computational chemists, systems biologists, structural biologists, and drug-discovery veterans — drew on their combined experience to separate what machine learning can credibly do for GPCR research from what still depends on pharmacological judgment. The conversation moves from definitional clarity (AI is not machine learning, and neither is simple computational modeling) to the practical realities of building usable datasets, deorphanizing receptors, handling generative models, and confronting the true-negatives problem that quietly breaks so many published models. For any scientist whose grant proposal now contains the phrase "machine learning" whether they fully believe in it or not, this panel is an honest audit of what the technology can deliver today and where it still falls short. About the Panelists Dr. Maria Waldhoer is Chief Scientific Officer at InterAx Biotech in Switzerland. A pharmacologist by training, she spent more than six years in early R&D at Novo Nordisk before turning to systems biology approaches for connecting in vitro signaling data to in vivo drug behavior. Dr. Aurélien Rizk is Chief Technology Officer at InterAx Biotech. Trained as a mathematician and computer scientist, his doctoral work focused on developing new methods for modeling GPCR signaling pathways. Dr. Yaroslav Nikolaev is a scientist at InterAx Biotech with a dual background in biology and computation. His research combines biomolecular NMR, structural biology, and machine learning to study how GPCRs function dynamically. Dr. Thomas Sakmar has run a laboratory at Rockefeller University for roughly thirty years. His group contributed to the early cloning of GPCRs in the mid-1980s and has since pushed the boundaries of GPCR biochemistry — including early homology modeling, coarse-grained molecular dynamics, and genetic code expansion for site-specific chemistry on receptors. Dr. Tudor Oprea is Principal Investigator at the University of New Mexico and coordinator of the Illuminating the Druggable Genome Knowledge Management Center. An MD-PhD who has practiced machine learning since 1989, he built Pharos, the public-facing data platform for the IDG program, and co-developed G1, the first agonist for GPR30, which reached an IND for melanoma. Scientific Themes of the Conversation The definitional boundary between AI, machine learning, and computational modeling Data quality as the rate-limiting step for machine learning in GPCR pharmacology Orphan receptor deorphanization and the limits of learning from known peptides Generative models, scoring functions, and the role of molecular dynamics in ligand design The true-negatives problem and how it distorts biological models The hybrid future: chemical intuition, experimental judgment, and where computation still falls short Key Insights from the Conversation AI and machine learning are not the same thing, and the difference matters. Machine learning finds patterns in defined datasets; AI aims to substitute for human reasoning more broadly. Using the terms interchangeably blurs what each approach can realistically deliver in a pharmacology workflow. The barrier isn't messy data — it's missing metadata. Most pharmacology datasets aren't useless for ML; they're incomplete. Buffers, incubation temperatures, time points, co-expression conditions, the specific Emax reference — these are the details that determine whether a dataset can be pooled with others or must stand alone. Deorphanization via AI is possible, but constrained by what we already know. Random-forest classifiers trained on known peptide ligands can find new orphan-receptor pairings. But the remaining orphans may be orphans precisely because they don't resemble anything we've characterized — which caps what this class of model can find. The bottleneck in structure-guided ML isn't the algorithm. The panel agreed that the real limits are the availability of high-resolution GPCR structures and the computational cost of molecular dynamics simulations needed to capture the dynamic conformations behind signaling. True negatives quietly wreck biological models. Most published models rely on inferred negatives — genes or molecules assumed inactive by convenience. When one panelist replaced inferred negatives in an autophagy model with CRISPR-validated true negatives, the model's predictions changed radically. Chemical intuition has no AI equivalent yet — and won't soon. The experience of a seasoned medicinal chemist mentally docking a molecule from a 2D structure is not a skill current models replicate. The panel expects a hybrid future, not a replacement one, for the next five to ten years. Olfactory GPCRs remain a trillion-dollar opportunity the field has largely ignored. GPCR-targeting drugs represent roughly 0.9 trillion dollars in global sales across 75 countries. Olfactory GPCRs — which account for a large fraction of the receptor class — have been systematically sidestepped for lack of tractable in vitro screening methods. Episode Timeline 00:00 Welcome from Yamina Berchiche 01:36 Panelist introductions 11:41 AI vs machine learning — the definitions that matter 15:21 The undrugged majority: 400 non-olfactory GPCRs, only 160 drugged 20:12 What makes a pharmacology dataset usable for machine learning 24:41 Advice for small academic labs entering the field 30:34 Can AI help deorphanize understudied receptors? 37:01 Reading GPCR signaling dynamics with computational models 39:53 Generative models, scoring functions, and molecular dynamics 50:32 The true-negatives problem and the limits of inferred datasets 52:30 Hype vs reality in AI drug discovery 55:05 Where the GPCR field goes in the next five years Timestamps were generated using AI for readability. Selected Quotes "My computational team told me, 'this receptor is not using arrestin to internalize. There has to be an arrestin-independent thing there.' And I'm like, that's rubbish. Never picked it up. Complete rubbish. And then a year later or so, I get a call from a colleague who said, 'oh, we've tested this compound as a negative control because we thought it doesn't need arrestin to internalize. And now we put it in this CRISPR knockout cell and — it does.'" — Dr. Maria Waldhoer "In 1989, as a med student in Romania, I used BASIC to model the variation in heart rate and blood pressure for 11 patients. I wrote an 11 polynomial that fit everything, so I thought I had solved the problem with drug discovery. I have learned a lot since." — Dr. Tudor Oprea "Dan Rich worked on HIV protease inhibitors. He would look at the 2D structure and basically mentally do a docking and tell you whether that's a good protease inhibitor or not. I think there are people who have worked in the GPCR field that can do a similar exercise." — Dr. Tudor Oprea "If you only make big enough numbers, big enough networks, big enough algorithms, suddenly intelligence pops out on the other side. [Roger Penrose] said, well, it's simply because they cannot think of anything else to do yet." — Dr. Maria Waldhoer About this episode Listen to this fantastic round table discussion that I had the privilege to moderate with Alexander Hauser . Our guests were Maria Waldhoer , Tudor I. Oprea , Thomas Sakmar , Aurelien Rizk & Yaroslav Nikolaev . The explosion of biomedical data such as in genomics, structural biology, and pharmacology can provide new opportunities to improve our understanding of human physiology and disease. In recent years, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods have received a significant boost in attention. ML/AI can be powerful for identifying abstract patterns within large data where traditional methods would be oblivious to. This comes without the need for manual feature engineering as systems can learn through implicit rules from the data provided. G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) mediate a vast variety of critical biological processes and provide an ideal case study for quantitative, and multi‐scale integration of these amounts of data to gain novel insights into receptor biology. How can we best leverage these exciting new techniques in areas such as protein structure prediction, bioactive ligand discovery, in-vivo translation ability, or in our understanding of signaling determinants? Here, we would like to discuss the opportunities, weaknesses, and advantages of these new technologies, which may contribute to probe our favorite targets at all scales. For more information on the ERNEST network, visit https://ernest-gpcr.eu/ . Dr. Yamina Berchiche on the web Website LinkedIn Publications Twitter Facebook Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Dr. Silvia Sposini About Dr. Silvia Sposini " I'm originally from Rome, Italy, where I studied Biological Sciences as a BSc student. I moved to London as a short experience (3 months) during my MSc but I ended up staying for a full year and and a PhD! During my time in London I investigated regulatory mechanisms of GPCR action, namely dimerization and membrane trafficking, in Dr Aylin Hanyaloglu 's lab at Imperial College London. In 2018 I got married and moved to France, to join the Interdisciplinary Institute for Neurosciences in Bordeaux. Still working on GPCR trafficking but this time in neurons. In 2021 I became mum of a gorgeous baby girl, Elena. I am currently funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from Wellcome Trust, working on a collaborative project (Dr Hanyaloglu's lab at ICL + Dr Perrais' lab at IINS) focused on understanding the interplay between GPCR signalling and trafficking in neurons using microscopy and proteomics based techniques. " Dr. Silvia Sposini on the web Bordeaux Neurocampus LinkedIn ResearchGate X (Twitter) Dr. GPCR Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) The Scientist's Compass: From Academia to Entrepreneurship with Dr. Dmitry Veprintsev In this episode, Yamina sits down with Prof. Dmitry Veprintsev , a molecular pharmacologist at the University of Nottingham, to discuss his scientific journey, GPCR research, and the intersection of academia and entrepreneurship. Key Takeaways: From Protein Folding to GPCRs – How Dmitry transitioned from biophysics and protein folding to cannabinoid receptor research, guided by key mentors like Michel Bouvier. Why GPCRs? – The challenge and excitement of working with notoriously difficult-to-study membrane proteins. The Power of Asking the Right Question – Dmitry emphasizes that mastering a technique isn’t enough—true scientific breakthroughs come from formulating the right biological questions. Building Z7 Biotech – The unexpected journey into biotech entrepreneurship, providing GPCR profiling services to pharma and biotech companies. Interdisciplinary Research & Future Directions – Exploring combinatorial drug actions, receptor interactions, and novel profiling approaches. Networking & Career Growth – Overcoming introversion, the importance of talking to people, and how networking (or just genuine curiosity) opens doors in science. 💡 Big Takeaway? Whether in academia or industry, success comes from curiosity, persistence, and knowing your values. Tune in to hear how Dmitry navigated his career, the challenges of studying GPCRs, and why talking to others will always lead to answers! Summary made with AI About Dmitry Veprintsev Dmitry is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE), University of Nottingham, where he provides leadership in structural and biophysical pharmacology of G protein coupled receptors. He is author of over 100 papers, including several in Nature, Science and Cell. Dmitry studied biophysics at the Moscow State University, followed by a PhD (1998) in protein folding at the Russian Academy of Sciences and at the Ohio State University, USA. He joined the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering and later at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a staff scientist, focusing on the biophysical studies of the tumour suppressor p53. In 2010 he became a group leader at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zürich in Switzerland, changing his attention to structural pharmacology of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). In 2017 Dmitry became a full professor at the Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors, COMPARE, a joined venture between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham. In 2021 he co-founded Z7 Biotech, developing and providing innovative GPCR drug screening and precision pharmacology services. Dmitry Veprintsev on the web LinkedIn Veprintsev Lab Z7 Biotech University of Nottingham Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Dr. Claudia Stäubert About Dr. Claudia Stäubert "I received my degree in biochemistry from Leipzig University (Germany) being already fascinated by G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) due to a stay as a scholarship student in the lab of Thue Schwartz (Copenhagen, Denmark). This fascination accompanied me and repeatedly challenged me ever since. During my Ph.D. at the International Max Planck Research School “The Leipzig School of Human Origins”, I focused on the evolutionary aspects of GPCRs. As a postdoc in the lab of Anders Nordström (Umeå, Sweden), I broadened my methodical and scientific horizon and focused on cellular metabolism and drug resistance phenomenon applying metabolomics analyses. Since 2014, I have led a research group at the Rudolf Schönheimer Institute of Biochemistry in Leipzig (Germany). We focus on several aspects of metabolite-sensing GPCRs including signal transduction, intracellular trafficking, and evolution. Our ultimate goal is to understand their role in immune cell function and cancer cell metabolism. " Dr. Claudia Stäubert on the web Stäubert Lab, Rudolf Schönheimer Institute of Biochemistry Leipzig LinkedIn ResearchGate ORCID ResearcherID Scopus Author ID Google Scholar PubMed Twitter Dr. GPCR AI Summary AI-generated content may be inaccurate or misleading. Always check for accuracy. Quick recap Yamina and Claudia had a wide-ranging discussion about Claudia's work on metabolites and their effects on the system. They also discussed the challenges of studying metabolites and their receptors, the relationship between metabolites, gut health, and disease progression, and Claudia's career journey in academia. They also explored the possibility of developing an ecosystem for the GPCR University. Summary Interview and Social Media Planning Yamina, from Dr. GPCR, discussed with Claudia, a guest from the Schiller Institute at Campstream, about Claudia's work and future plans. Yamina mentioned that they would use their discussion as a basis for crafting social media posts. Claudia, who has an interest in metabolites and their effects on the system, agreed. Yamina also pointed out that Claudia was their first guest of the year, indicating the start of a new series of interviews. Affordable Childcare and GPCR Research Discussion Yamina and Claudia discussed the importance of affordable childcare and the experiences of PhD students in the US and Europe. Claudia shared her experiences working in Sweden and Germany, and how she secured funding for her research on the effects of metabolites on GPCRs. Yamina expressed interest in attending a meeting about GPCRs and metabolism in the UK, but was unsure if she could make it due to travel constraints. Metabolite Activation of GPCRs: A Fascinating Discovery Claudia and Yamina discussed the role of metabolites in activating GPCRs, a process that they found fascinating. Yamina expressed interest in learning more about this topic as she realized her lack of knowledge on metabolite recognition or binding to GPCRs. Claudia suggested possible next steps, including researching review articles or articles to gain a higher understanding of what is known about this process. Challenges in Studying Metabolites and Receptors Claudia and Yamina discussed the challenges of studying metabolites and their receptors, particularly in relation to fermented foods. They acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing between different compounds and the effect of media on the cellular system. They also explored the potential for better tools to understand and discover new metabolites or receptors. Yamina suggested the possibility of using native cells with optimized media, but Claudia highlighted the complexity of the system. They briefly touched upon the link between GPCRs and diseases, such as diabetes, but did not delve into detail. Metabolites, Gut Health, and Disease Progression Yamina and Claudia had a discussion about the relationship between metabolites, gut health, and disease progression. Yamina proposed that the metabolites in the gut of a non-healthy person might be different from those of a healthy person, which could affect receptor activity. Claudia agreed, suggesting that the complexity of the gut microbiome is akin to a "complicated city vicus". Yamina shared an example she heard in a podcast about fecal transplants and the relationship between the gut, brain, and metabolism. Both agreed on the complexity of the topic, with Claudia concluding that diseases might first affect the metabolites and not necessarily lack inherited genes. Academia, Career Journeys, and Advice Yamina and Claudia discussed Claudia's career journey in academia. Claudia shared her experiences and her love for her work, emphasizing the importance of research and learning in academia. Yamina highlighted the challenges of career choices, especially when family situations are involved. Claudia also mentioned the significant experiences that shaped her career trajectory, such as her time in an assurance lab and her trip to Sweden. Towards the end, Claudia offered advice to junior scientists, suggesting that they explore different fields and meet a variety of people to find their interests. She also mentioned her team's job openings and where people could find more information. Developing a Research Ecosystem at GPCR University Yamina and Claudia discussed developing an ecosystem for the GPCR University, with the goal of providing a central hub for researchers in the field. Yamina emphasized its vision for the platform to be a place where researchers can find content, ask questions, and collaborate, thereby avoiding the repetition of unsuccessful studies. They also touched on the potential for funding from external sources. Claudia briefly mentioned a recommendation from the Committee on Petitions. Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

Beatriz Blanco-Redondo on characterizing unknown adhesion GPCRs in Drosophila - receptor discovery, nocifensive behavior, and human disease links. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Beatriz Blanco-Redondo: Adhesion GPCR Discovery in Drosophila Adhesion GPCRs are among the least characterized receptor families in the human genome , and in Drosophila Melanogaster, three of the five known adhesion GPCRs had no documented function, expression pattern, or signaling profile when Beatriz Blanco-Redondo's group began working on them. The receptors were named after condiments, ketchup, mayo, and remulate, not out of irreverence, but because no functional data yet existed to guide any other kind of nomenclature. Blanco-Redondo, group leader at the University of Leipzig, uses CRISPR engineering and in vivo behavioral assays to build the first systematic characterization of these receptors from the ground up. Her primary focus is Remulate, a neuronal adhesion GPCR with a human ortholog linked to vascular malformations and blood-brain barrier dysfunction in vertebrate models. The fly system makes it tractable: new lines in weeks, knockouts in months, and behavioral readouts that connect receptor loss to nocifensive phenotypes in larvae. For Blanco-Redondo, the pull toward this work is not abstract. Remulate is the receptor she secured funding to study, the one her first PhD student built an entire project around, and the one that still does not have a complete localization map. This conversation covers what it looks like to do receptor biology when you are writing the first chapter, without antibodies, no prior literature, and no established toolkit to fall back on. About the Guest Beatriz Blanco-Redondo is a group leader in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Leipzig, where she studies adhesion GPCRs in Drosophila melanogaster. Her research focuses on characterizing the localization, signaling, and in vivo function of previously unknown adhesion receptors in the fly nervous system and gut. She trained in protein biochemistry and neuroscience, completing her PhD in Germany and her postdoctoral work at Columbia University, where she worked on ALS models using mouse systems. Since returning to Europe, her research has centered on receptor biology at the intersection of basic discovery and translational relevance. Scientific Themes of the Conversation First-contact receptor characterization, what it means to study a GPCR with no prior functional data Genetic tools for adhesion GPCR research in Drosophila, CRISPR, epitope tagging, and knockout strategies The logic of model organism selection : speed, genetic tractability, and translational value Nocifensive behavior as a readout for neuronal receptor function in larvae Human ortholog connections, from fly adhesion GPCRs to vertebrate vascular and neurological disease Career decisions in academic science, uncertainty, reentry, and the conditions that keep scientists in the lab Key Insights from the Conversation 1. Three adhesion GPCRs in Drosophila were functionally unknown until recently When Blanco-Redondo's group began this work, five adhesion GPCRs were known in the fly, but only two had any functional characterization. The other three had no documented expression pattern, signaling data, or phenotype. The approach was systematic: generate knockouts, introduce epitope tags, observe what breaks, and build the picture from scratch. There was no shortcut available because there was no prior literature to build on. 2. Naming receptors after condiments signals where the field actually stands Ketchup, Mayo, and Remulate were named in the absence of functional data that would normally guide nomenclature. It is a small detail, but it marks something real about the state of adhesion GPCR biology in insects: these receptors exist in a space where the biology precedes the vocabulary. The playfulness of the naming reflects the honesty of the situation. 3. Remulate connects fly neuroscience to human vascular and neurological pathology In the peripheral nervous system of Drosophila larvae, loss of Remulate disrupts nocifensive behavior - the animal's response to aversive stimuli. The human ortholog has been associated with vascular malformations and blood-brain barrier dysfunction in vertebrate models. That thread, from a behavioral assay in a fly larva to a clinical phenotype in mice, is what gives the model system its translational justification. 4. Antibody limitations drive the methodological design Because the antibody landscape for adhesion GPCRs is sparse and largely underdeveloped for fly receptors, Blanco-Redondo's group relies on CRISPR-introduced epitope tags to track receptor localization in vivo. This is not a workaround. It is a deliberate strategy that delivers spatial resolution that antibody-based approaches cannot offer for these targets at this stage of the field. 5. Drosophila generations close the experimental feedback loop A new fly line is ready in one to two weeks. A knockout can be generated and validated in two to three months. For receptor biology that requires iterative genetic manipulation - knocking out, tagging, rescuing, observing, this compression of experimental time changes which questions are tractable within a single grant period. It is not incidental to the science; it is part of the scientific logic. 6. Reconsidering a career is not the same as leaving science Blanco-Redondo describes a period after returning from New York when she was genuinely uncertain about continuing in the lab. The decision to stay came from a specific opportunity, a specific mentor, and a specific set of questions she hadn't yet answered. It did not resolve into a clean narrative. It was uncertain, and she says so plainly. 7. Negative results need infrastructure, not just tolerance Blanco-Redondo and Berchiche discuss the cost of unpublished negative data, particularly for PhD students working within three-year funding windows. The argument is not sentimental. If a failed approach were citable, it would shorten the path for the next researcher attempting the same thing. Some journals are beginning to accept negative data, and both agree this matters structurally. Episode Timeline Timestamps are AI-generated from the transcript and may not reflect the final edited episode precisely. Verify against the published video before use. 00:00 - Sponsor intro: GeneTex and Eurofins DiscoverX 00:29 - Introduction of Beatriz Blanco-Redondo; icebreaker 01:15 - Career path: from Spain to Germany, and the decision to go further 05:57 - Dr. GPCR University mid-roll 06:17 - Life in New York; comparing research cultures across continents 08:30 - How adhesion GPCRs entered the picture, and the shift toward receptor biology 11:49 - Research program in Leipzig: three unknown adhesion GPCRs in Drosophila 13:57 - Naming Remulate, ketchup, and mayo; why Remulate became the primary focus 15:47 - Lab methods: CRISPR, epitope tagging, colony generation timelines 17:29 - Behavioral and phenotypic readouts; nocifensive responses in larvae 18:48 - The human ortholog of Remulate and connections to vascular and neurological disease 22:58 - What first-contact receptor characterization actually looks like 26:02 - Career turning points; uncertainty on returning from the US 33:25 - Advice for scientists working on adhesion GPCRs and difficult model systems 35:26 - The case for publishing negative results; pressure on PhD timelines 40:54 - Upcoming GPCR conferences in Leipzig and Dusseldorf Selected Quotes "It's like there's nothing known at all about this receptor. And then you come into play and piece by piece you try to put the pieces together - it's like a puzzle. And then at the end, you can discover what a receptor that was there in the fly - nobody ever checked what it's doing." "When I moved back from the US, I was not sure I wanted to continue in science. Thanks to Toby, that gave me a position here, and I could stay. Yeah, I'm still here - so it means that I enjoy it." "You come from disease and then you're working on a receptor and you want to study what happens there. But then to see all the possibilities that this offers - that was also great." "Don't give up, because it's your passion, it's your job. We love what we do. And we have a lot of friends who don't like what they are doing. And this is very important." Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Exploring Career Paths in GPCR Research with Dr. Jacek Mokrosiński About Dr. Jacek Mokrosiński "Jacek is a Senior Scientist at Novo Nordisk specializing in molecular pharmacology and cell-based screening technologies. He works in a multidisciplinary Chemical Biology team based at the recently established US R&D hub in Lexington, MA. Originally from Łódź, Poland, Jacek completed his Master's degree in Biology, specializing in Biochemistry at the University of Łódź. He then moved to Denmark, where he trained at the University of Copenhagen under supervision of Professor Thue W. Schwartz, and worked closely with Dr Birgitte Holst studying structural and mechanistic properties of ghrelin receptor and GPCRs involved in regulation of metabolism. After completing his Ph.D., he pursued research in genetics of metabolic regulation at the Institute of Metabolic Science - Metabolic Research Laboratories at the University of Cambridge in the team led by Professor I. Sadaf Farooqi. His research aimed at understanding molecular mechanism through which rare genetic variation may lead to or protecting from excessive body weight gain. As part of Farooqi's team, he characterized a series of novel human genetic variants identified in several GPCRs associated with obesity and other metabolic diseases, including GPR10, Melanocortin 4, Serotonin 2C and TRH receptors. Since 2021, Jacek has been working at Novo Nordisk at its research sites in the UK (Oxford) and the US (Indianapolis, Indiana and most recently Lexington, Massachusetts). He is passionate about cell-based in vitro technologies to study mechanistic properties of GPCRs and understanding the dynamics of receptor signalling. He is an avid proponent of close collaboration between industry and academia." Dr. Jacek Mokrosiński on the web ORCID ResearchGate LinkedIn Twitter Dr. GPCR AI Summary AI-generated content may be inaccurate or misleading. Always check for accuracy. Quick Recap Yamina and Jacek discussed their experiences with name mispronunciations, cultural differences, and the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in drug development. They also shared their career journeys, emphasizing the value of being open-minded, proactive, and embracing new opportunities. Lastly, they discussed their research interests, particularly in the field of GPCR, and the importance of method development, integrity, and honesty in scientific research. Next Steps Jacek will collaborate with Alex Romeo on a podcast about transitioning to the industry. In future talks and interviews, Jacek will share his stories and advice about GPCRs. Yamina will schedule a future talk with Jacek about GPCRs as therapeutic modalities. Summary Embracing Cultural Differences and Collaboration Yamina and Jacek shared their experiences with name mispronunciations and variations and discussed the importance of embracing cultural differences. They also discussed their professional backgrounds, highlighting the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach in drug development and the importance of collaboration between academia and industry. They talked about their shared passion for advancing science and improving patient outcomes, and their early interests in science and chemistry. They also shared their appreciation for documentaries showcasing manufacturing processes and the value of true experimentation in scientific research. Jacek's Career Journey and Advice Jacek and Yamina discussed Jacek's career journey, focusing on his experiences, challenges, and lessons learned. Jacek highlighted the importance of being open-minded and proactive, emphasizing that he learned by doing rather than taking specific courses. He also underscored the role of the people around him, expressing gratitude for their guidance and support. His advice was to be ready for changes and to embrace opportunities as they arise. Jacek's career path, which led him from Poland to Denmark and then to the US, exemplified his advice in action. Passion for Science and Career Journeys Yamina and Jacek discussed their passion for science and how it led them to their current careers. Jacek shared his experience of working with Piketa and how he found a job in Seda's lab at Cambridge, where he could immediately contribute due to his technical skills. Yamina agreed with Jacek's sentiments and spoke about her own journey, expressing her happiness in discussing science and reading papers. They emphasized the importance of finding a job that aligns with one's interests and strengths and being open to opportunities. They also highlighted the need for a work-life balance and the joy of a well-done job. Embracing Networking for Professional Growth Jacek and Yamina discussed the importance of building a network and being open to new opportunities. Jacek realized that being introverted doesn't mean he can't benefit from networking and interaction with others. He also highlighted the benefits of attending conferences and engaging with colleagues, sharing examples of how such interactions led to collaborations and new opportunities. Yamina agreed, emphasizing the importance of mental preparation and embracing different social situations, both virtual and in-person. They underscored the value of these interactions for professional growth and encouraged others to adopt a proactive approach to networking. Building Professional Connections Strategies Yamina and Jacek discussed the importance of building professional connections and strategies for introducing oneself to potential contacts. They emphasized the need to be mindful of the other person's time, provide clear explanations for the purpose of the connection, and offer something of value in return. They also highlighted the advantages of using LinkedIn as a tool for networking and the significance of personalizing messages to make a lasting impression. GPCR Research Interests and Collaborations Yamina and Jacek had a deep and engaging discussion about their research interests and achievements, particularly in the field of GPCR. Jacek shared his fascination with the growth hormone secretion receptor and the melanocortin 4 receptor, and their roles in regulating body weight and growth. Yamina, in turn, talked about her work on melanocortin receptors and an upcoming collaboration with a postdoc scientist. They also highlighted the importance of method development, integrity, and honesty in scientific research. The discussion revealed their interest in GPCRs as therapeutic modalities and possible future collaborations. Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

How GPCR genetic variants shape psychiatric drug response - Hauser on pharmacogenomics, the iPSYCH biobank, and precision psychiatry at population scale. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Alexander Hauser: GPCR Pharmacogenomics and Precision Psychiatry GPCR drug targets carry genetic variation that is far more widespread across human populations than the field has historically appreciated. Hauser's research program asks a pointed question: if a patient fails to respond to a psychiatric drug, or experiences an adverse reaction, is there a GPCR variant in their genome that explains it - and can we find it systematically? To answer this, his work integrates GPCR molecular pharmacology with computational biology, population genetics, and pharmacoepidemiology, drawing on Denmark's iPSYCH biobank - a cohort of 100,000 genotyped psychiatric patients linked to national prescription registries. In parallel, his earlier work on orphan receptor deorphanization used co-evolution analysis and machine learning to generate candidate peptide ligands for putative peptide-binding orphan GPCRs, producing a library of 218 synthetic peptides and yielding the first confirmed hits. Together, these projects represent a rare attempt to connect the molecular detail of receptor pharmacology with the population-scale reality of how those receptors behave in living patients. For Hauser, the stakes are personal: precision psychiatry only matters if it eventually changes what a clinician prescribes. About the Guest Alexander Hauser is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, with a part-time affiliation at the Institute for Biological Psychiatry. His research integrates GPCR molecular pharmacology, computational biology, and pharmacoepidemiology to study how human genetic variation in GPCR drug targets shapes drug response and disease risk at a population scale. He completed his PhD under David Gloriam in Copenhagen and an external stay at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge with Madan Babu. His work spans structural analysis, machine learning, population genetics, and the clinical translation challenges that come with precision medicine. Scientific Themes of the Conversation The prevalence and functional consequences of GPCR genetic variants across human populations Co-evolution and machine learning as a framework for orphan receptor deorphanization Denmark's iPSYCH biobank as a unique resource for population-scale GPCR pharmacogenomics The epistemological limits of computational pharmacology without domain knowledge The translational gap between pharmacogenomics findings and clinical prescription practice Interdisciplinary collaboration as a scientific strategy - and its structural requirements Key Insights from the Conversation 1. GPCR variants are not rare edge cases - they are widespread and consequential The prevailing assumption that human GPCR sequences are largely conserved does not hold at a population scale. Hauser's work identified that variants are continuously arising across GPCR drug targets and likely contribute to adverse drug reactions through several distinct mechanisms. This has direct implications for how drug safety is assessed and how clinical trials are designed. 2. Orphan receptors can be systematically approached through evolutionary logic Rather than screening compound libraries blindly against orphan GPCRs, Hauser designed a ligand library by learning the structural and evolutionary logic of known peptide hormone - receptor pairings. The result was 218 candidate peptides, several of which produced confirmed hits in cell-based assays. The approach treats the evolutionary record as a pharmacological hypothesis generator. 3. Denmark's registry infrastructure makes a fundamentally different kind of science possible Most biobanks require active consent and recruit selected populations that do not represent a country's full demographic range. Denmark's CPR number system links psychiatric diagnoses, prescription histories, genotypes, and demographic data across 100,000 patients - without recruitment bias. This allows Hauser to study GPCR variant effects in the context of real prescribing decisions, not controlled cohorts. 4. Computational skill without pharmacological domain knowledge produces noise, not insight Hauser draws a sharp distinction between the ability to manipulate large datasets and the ability to interpret them. Knowing how a dataset was generated - what assay conditions, what cell lines, what confounders - is not optional context. It determines whether a computational finding is meaningful or meaningless. This is the argument for keeping computational pharmacologists embedded in pharmacological communities. 5. Translating pharmacogenomics to clinical practice requires clinical co-design from the start Publishing a finding that GPCR variants predict drug response is not the same as changing a prescription. Hauser is direct about the gap: clinicians need to have shaped the question, not just received the answer. Research that bypasses clinical input tends to stay in the research community. The patient impact requires the clinician's voice in the design phase. 6. The breadth of a scientific career is sometimes a temperament, not a strategy Hauser traces his integrative approach - bridging structural biology, evolutionary data, genetics, and psychiatry - back to a flexible undergraduate program and a deliberate resistance to early specialization. The same quality that led him to a working visa year in Australia before university is the quality that now lets him move across disciplinary boundaries without losing his footing in any of them. Episode Timeline Timestamps are AI-generated from the transcript and should be verified against the final edited audio before publication. 00:00 - Introduction and ecosystem announcements 01:33 - Hauser introduces himself - GPCRs, pharmacogenomics, and precision psychiatry 06:47 - Denmark's iPSYCH biobank and what makes nationwide registry data unique 09:15 - GDPR, unconsented patient data, and the ethics of population-scale research 10:14 - Origin story - hospital internship, Australia, and the decision to pursue science 13:06 - First exposure to computational chemistry - a rotation in Hyderabad 16:04 - Joining David Gloriam's group and first encounter with GPCRs 17:14 - What a computational GPCR scientist actually does across a typical week 20:51 - Having children during a PhD - why Denmark's culture makes it structurally possible 31:45 - Mentoring philosophy - teaching through mistakes and sustaining relationships after departure 37:19 - Networking, collaboration, and the danger of doing science in a bubble 44:18 - Building toward an independent group - precision psychiatry as the research anchor 46:06 - The translational challenge - convincing clinicians to act on pharmacogenomics findings 50:02 - Advice to junior scientists considering a GPCR or computational career 52:44 - Eureka moment - first hits from 218 peptides screened against orphan receptors Selected Quotes "I'm trying to stay in the GPCR field while trying to bring in new methods from other fields and expanding on the clinical implementation and investigation as much as possible." "It's not enough to just be able to manipulate datasets. You really need to also combine it with domain knowledge. Otherwise it's just numbers and labels - and it becomes very quickly very meaningless." "It's important to have clinicians on board very early on. Because otherwise you just throw another paper out there, but it doesn't get traction - it stays in the community. If your ambition is that it has an impact on the patient, then you have to work with the people who are eventually using that information." "Every new result leads you to be more hopeful or to be happier about the outcome. In science you always have to be skeptical about your results. So every time you have your results, you're less skeptical - and that can make you happy." About Dr. Alexander S. Hauser Alexander is currently a postdoc as a member of the personalized medicine cluster in Copenhagen and at the Institute of Biological Psychiatry in Roskilde working with the UK Biobank and other large-scale population cohorts. Alexander has a big interest in the integration of large biomedical data in genomics, structural biology, pharmacology, and pharmacoepidemiology with innovative computational methods to gain novel insights into receptor biology. During his Ph.D. with David Gloriam at the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology in Copenhagen, he worked on novel analytical methods to identify human signaling systems and thereby discovered endogenous peptides activating several orphan receptors. Alexander had a research sabbatical with Madan Babu at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, where he was working on the impact of genetic variations on drug response. He received the “HC Ørsted Research talent prize” and “Bayer Pharmaceuticals Ph.D. Award” for his work on GPCRs. Dr. Alexander S. Hauser on the web Twitter ResearchGate University of Copenhagen LinkedIn Google Scholar Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

<< Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Chris Langmead Chris Langmead is Professor, Deputy Director, and Better Medicines Theme Leader of the Neuromedicines Discovery Centre at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), a collaborative venture targeting new medicines development for poorly-treated mental health disorders. He also directs a collaborative neuroscience R&D program with Servier (France) and is the co-founder and CEO of Phrenix Therapeutics, a biotech spin-out from the Neuromedicines Discovery Centre that is developing next-generation therapeutics for schizophrenia. Prior to these roles this he was Head of Pharmacology at Heptares Therapeutics Ltd., a UK-based biotechnology company (2009-2012), where he was responsible all of the company’s discovery biology. He is an acknowledged expert in drug discovery, particularly in the field of psychiatry, where he has led multiple projects into late stage preclinical development, many of which have progressed into clinical trials. These successes enabled the US$400M sale of Heptares Therapeutics Ltd. to the Sosei Group Corporation in 2015. Prior to joining Heptares, Chris was a neuroscience researcher at GlaxoSmithKline, UK (1998-2009). He has a degree and PhD in pharmacology from Queens' College, Cambridge and University College London, respectively, was the youngest person to be elected as a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society in 2012, and was the recipient of the British Pharmacological Society Novartis Prize in 2017. Chris serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Pharmacology, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science and Frontiers in Pharmacology. He is also a corresponding member of NC-IUPHAR. He has published over 70 research articles, reviews and book chapters on drug discovery, which have been cited over 5000 times. Christopher Langmead on the web Monash University T witter Google Scholar Linkedin PubMed Monash Neuromedicines Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

Gloriam on orphan GPCR biology, GPCRDB, biased signaling, and how the data analysis bottleneck is reshaping receptor pharmacology and drug discovery. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) David Gloriam: Orphan Receptors, GPCRDB, and the Data Revolution in GPCR Pharmacology GPCRs represent the largest and most pharmacologically important family of membrane receptors, yet a significant portion remain orphans - proteins whose endogenous ligands and physiological roles are still unknown. This conversation explores the intersection of computational biology, cheminformatics, and structural pharmacology through the work of David Gloriam, whose career spans the identification of 26 novel human GPCRs from genome sequence data to the development of GPCRDB, a community resource used by more than 4,400 researchers monthly. Gloriam's research addresses a central challenge in the field: how to move from a bare protein sequence to a pharmacologically characterized receptor with identified ligands, a determined structure, and a plausible role in physiology. The conversation covers the de-orphanization of GPR139 and GPR55, the unresolved promise of biased agonism as a strategy for safer drug development, and the concept of data-accelerated receptor evolution as a framework for engineering receptor-ligand interactions at the residue level. For Gloriam, this work began with a grandmother's cancer diagnosis and an early determination to develop drugs - a goal that led him through the human genome and into a decades-long pursuit of receptors whose functions remain to be written. ABOUT THE GUEST David Gloriam is a professor at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, where he leads a multidisciplinary research group working across data science, computational drug design, pharmacology, and structural biology. His primary research focus is orphan GPCR biology, with particular emphasis on identifying endogenous ligands and physiological roles for receptors discovered during the human genome sequencing era. He maintains and develops GPCRDB, a continuously updated database and tool platform that integrates structural, functional, and ligand data for the entire GPCR superfamily. His group contributed to the de-orphanization of GPR139 and GPR55, including the identification of sub-nanomolar peptide ligand candidates, and has published widely on computational approaches to GPCR drug discovery and receptor classification. SCIENTIFIC THEMES OF THE CONVERSATION Orphan GPCR biology - the challenge of connecting a protein sequence to a physiological function GPCRDB as community infrastructure for integrating and accelerating GPCR research The interdisciplinary de-orphanization pipeline: from bioinformatics to pharmacology to structure The data interpretation bottleneck - how the field's rate-limiting step has fundamentally shifted Biased agonism: from theoretical framework to the challenge of pathway-specific drug design Data-accelerated receptor evolution: engineering GPCR function at the single residue level KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE CONVERSATION The Human Genome as a Discovery Platform When Gloriam joined a bioinformatics group during his master's studies, the first human genome sequence had just become available. Working within that resource, his group identified 26 previously unknown GPCRs in the span of a few years - a pace of discovery that would have been impossible through classical biochemical approaches. The experience established his conviction that computational analysis could function as a genuine primary discovery tool, not merely as support for bench science. De-Orphanization Is a Full-Discipline Effort The process of characterizing an orphan receptor from protein sequence to identified ligand to determined structure cannot be completed within a single lab or a single methodology. Gloriam described the journey of GPR139 as spanning sequence-based phylogeny, database mining for tissue expression, virtual screening, pharmacological assay development, machine learning-guided ligand identification, and finally structural collaboration with external groups. The full arc took more than a decade and required sustained coordination across disciplines that rarely share a lab bench. Taking Over GPCRDB Without a Safety Net When the original GPCRDB team approached retirement, Gloriam chose to carry the resource forward despite holding no tenure and working under a two-year contract. He described it as one of the major single decisions of his career - a bet that the community would respond and the opportunity would justify the risk. The response exceeded his expectations: within years, researchers he had never met were greeting him at conferences by name because of the database. The Bottleneck Has Flipped For most of the history of pharmacological research, generating reliable data was the rate-limiting step. Gloriam argued that this has fundamentally changed: the volume and diversity of available data now far outpaces the field's capacity to analyze and interpret it. This shift places data scientists and computational biologists in a newly central role - not as support for experimentalists, but as the primary constraint to overcome in advancing receptor biology. Biased Agonism Still Needs Its Proof of Concept A drug designed around biased agonism principles received regulatory approval, but its actual functional selectivity has since been questioned - with some researchers arguing it may be a partial agonist rather than a genuinely biased compound. Gloriam identified this ambiguity as symptomatic of a deeper challenge: the field has not yet fully characterized which signaling pathways produce therapeutic benefit and which produce side effects across the GPCR targets most relevant to disease. Until that pathway-level map is built, designing genuinely biased drugs remains a hypothesis in search of its first clean demonstration. Leadership Is a Learnable Skill - If You Seek the Training Gloriam took formal research leadership training before his group was large enough to require it - acting on advice from mentors who recognized that funding panels wanted evidence of leadership readiness alongside scientific merit. He described coaching sessions, national leadership courses, and the deliberate selection of mentors who had recently navigated the specific challenges he was facing. The result was a structured group management model built around four specialized subgroups, each with a senior researcher as daily supervisor - a design that reduced bottlenecks and allowed the science to scale beyond what one group leader could hold. Open Science as the Next Infrastructure Problem Gloriam articulated a vision for GPCRDB as more than a data repository - a shared scientific workspace where researchers could surface big unsolved problems, correspond across institutions, design experiments collectively, and deposit results in a structured format accessible to the entire community. He described the complete characterization of biased signaling pathways across all GPCRs as one such challenge: too large for any single group, and structurally dependent on coordinated community effort that currently has no home. EPISODE TIMELINE Timestamps are AI-generated estimates based on the transcript and may not align exactly with the final edited episode. Verify against the published audio before use. 00:00 Welcome and introduction of David Gloriam 02:23 Career origins - from childhood medicine ambitions to pharmaceutical sciences and bioinformatics 05:34 The human genome treasure hunt - discovering 26 new GPCRs from sequence data 11:55 Orphan GPCRs - years spent chasing receptors with no known function or ligand 13:31 De-orphanizing GPR55 and GPR139 - the full pipeline from sequence to structure 17:21 GPCRDB - origin story, the career-defining decision to take it over, and its growth 23:21 Two frontiers: residue-level receptor function and the unresolved challenge of biased agonism 30:29 Managing a multidisciplinary group of 15 - subgroups, leadership training, and delegation 40:41 What excites Gloriam today - open science models and the long-term vision for GPCRDB 50:01 Career-defining moments, work-life balance, and advice for junior scientists SELECTED QUOTES "Whereas data generation used to be the limiting factor, today it's the analysis and the interpretation and understanding of the data - because we have so much data now, and it's actually our ability to understand it." "The day I stop learning, I might as well die. For me, the actual development - that's the thing. And that's the fun part." "I walked in there and I did the best performance ever. And I walked out and I felt - I think I did it. I did it, yes." "When I come into work and I have a group member that does something better than I do - that's actually what makes me the most proud." About this episode David Gloriam is a Professor in Computational Receptor Biology at the University of Copenhagen where he leads a research cluster for GPCR function and drug discovery and a Pharmaceutical Data Science unit. His group runs the GPCRdb database where ~4,000 researchers each month retrieve reference data and access online tools for analysis, visualization, and experiment design. David obtained his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in Sweden where he worked on the bioinformatic identification of 24 novel human G protein-coupled receptors. He later identified physiological hormones of such under characterized ‘orphan’ receptors and functional probes for a range of receptors. He completed two postdocs in the UK at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and GlaxoSmithKline . In 2018 he joined the University of Copenhagen, where he has received an ERC Starting Grant, Lundbeck Foundation Fellowship, and Novo Nordisk Foundation Ascending Investigator awards. Dr. Gloriam is a corresponding member of the Nomenclature Committee of the International Union of Pharmacology (IUPHAR). He is one of the coordinators of recommendations to describe ligand bias towards signaling probes and safer drugs. His group recently developed an online resource of biased ligands and pathway effects to advance the biased signaling field. Join me a learn more about David’s work, his career trajectory, and GPCRdb. Dr. David E. Gloriam on the web LinkedIn ResearchGate Twitter Google Scholar Computation Receptor Biology- Gloriam Group GPCRdb Dr. GPCR Ecosystem Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>