Will Burn
Contact information
william.seaton-burn@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Centre for Medicines Discovery, NDM Research Building, Old Road Campus, Roosevelt Drive, Oxford OX3 7FZ
Research groups
Will Burn
DPhil in Clinical Medicine student
Transmembrane receptor kinase signal transduction in childhood cancers and rare genetic disorders
Research interests
I use structural, biophysical and cell biology methods to study transmembrane receptor serine-threonine kinases (RSTKs) and their mechanisms of signal transduction.
Receptor kinases are found in cell membranes throughout the human body from within the heart to inside glia deep in the brain. They form higher-order complexes responsible for the transfer of information that decides cell fate. They are powerful yet delicate. Single residue changes to their sequences drive the development of highly-fatal cancers and genetic disorders in children. The addition of just three atoms to the ACVR1 kinase can be enough to cause the paralysing condition Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva where a patient develops a second skeleton.
I am working to describe the multiple, overlapping mechanisms that cause these diseases and doing all I can to speed up the discovery and development of medicine to target these receptors and their active signalling complexes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32004-w
