Melissa Bowerman
Lecturer, Bioscience, School of Medicine at Keele University
Group Member of the Wolfson Centre for Inherited Neuromuscular Disease in Oswestry, Principal Investigator in the UK SMA Research Consortium
Research Interests: Spinal muscular atrophy, drug repurposing, skeletal muscle, metabolism, dietary interventions
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Biography
Dr. Bowerman is a Lecturer in Bioscience at the School of Medicine at Keele University, a group Member of the Wolfson Centre for Inherited Neuromuscular Disease in Oswestry and a principal investigator in the UK SMA Research Consortium.
Dr Bowerman completed her Ph.D. (2006-2012) in Dr Rashmi Kothary’s laboratory (Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI)/University of Ottawa, Canada) where she held a CIHR Frederick Banting and Charles Best doctoral award and received the OHRI Dr. Ronald G. Worton Researcher in Training Award. Dr. Bowerman then joined Dr. Cedric Raoul’s laboratory at the Institut des Neurosciences de Montpellier in France as an EMBO Long-Term Fellow (2012-2014). From 2014-2016, Dr. Bowerman was a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford in Professor Matthew Wood’s group. In October 2015, Dr. Bowerman was the recipient of a Junior Research Fellowship at Somerville College, University of Oxford (2015-2017). In January 2016, Dr. Bowerman was awarded and SMA Trust Career Development Fellowship at the University of Oxford.
Dr. Bowerman’s current research interests are on identifying pathological players in skeletal muscle and other metabolic tissues and evaluate how they mediate and exacerbate muscle pathology and metabolic defects in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Importantly, a key feature of her work is to develop novel therapeutic approaches (using omics, bioinformatics and drug repurposing strategies) that can be used in combination with clinically relevant SMN gene-based therapies.
For further information on Dr. Bowerman’s research and public engagement activities: https://www.thebowermanlab.com/.
Read Dr. Bowerman’s blog for the NMD4C here: https://neuromuscularnetwork.ca/dr-melissa-bowermans-blog/.
Recent Publications
Benlefki, S, Younes, R, Challuau, D, Bernard-Marissal, N, Hilaire, C, Scamps, F et al.. Differential effect of Fas activation on spinal muscular atrophy motoneuron death and induction of axonal growth. Cell Mol Biol (Noisy-le-grand). 2023.69 (10)1-8 PMID:37953591
Hoolachan, JM, McCallion, E, Sutton, ER, Çetin, Ö, Pacheco-Torres, P, Dimitriadi, M et al.. A transcriptomics-based drug repositioning approach to identify drugs with similar activities for the treatment of muscle pathologies in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) models. Hum Mol Genet. 2024.33 (5)400-425 PMID:37947217
Selvakumaran, J, Ursu, S, Bowerman, M, Lu-Nguyen, N, Wood, MJ, Malerba, A et al.. An Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Human Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) Model to Test the Crossing by Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) Vectors and Antisense Oligonucleotides. Biomedicines. 2023.11 (10) PMID:37893074
Brown, SJ, Šoltić, D, Synowsky, SA, Shirran, SL, Chilcott, E, Shorrock, HK et al.. AAV9-mediated SMN gene therapy rescues cardiac desmin but not lamin A/C and elastin dysregulation in Smn2B/- spinal muscular atrophy mice. Hum Mol Genet. 2023.32 (20)2950-2965 PMID:37498175
Nafchi, NAM, Chilcott, EM, Brown, S, Fuller, HR, Bowerman, M, Yáñez-Muñoz, RJ et al.. Enhanced expression of the human Survival motor neuron 1 gene from a codon-optimised cDNA transgene in vitro and in vivo. Gene Ther. 2023.30 (12)812-825 PMID:37322133
O'Connor, G, Edel, L, Raquq, S, Bowerman, M, Szmurlo, A, Simpson, Z et al.. Open-labelled study to monitor the effect of an amino acid formula on symptom management in children with spinal muscular atrophy type I: The SMAAF pilot study. Nutr Clin Pract. 2023.38 (4)871-880 PMID:36504203
Meijboom, KE, Sutton, ER, McCallion, E, McFall, E, Anthony, D, Edwards, B et al.. Dysregulation of Tweak and Fn14 in skeletal muscle of spinal muscular atrophy mice. Skelet Muscle. 2022.12 (1)18 PMID:35902978
Detering, NT, Zambon, A, Hensel, N, Kothary, R, Swoboda, K, Gillingwater, TH et al.. 264th ENMC International Workshop: Multi-system involvement in spinal muscular atrophy Hoofddorp, the Netherlands, November 19th - 21st 2021. Neuromuscul Disord. 2022.32 (8)697-705 PMID:35794048
Betts, CA, Jagannath, A, van Westering, TL, Bowerman, M, Banerjee, S, Meng, J et al.. Dystrophin involvement in peripheral circadian SRF signalling. Life Sci Alliance. 2021.4 (10) PMID:34389686
Meijboom, KE, Volpato, V, Monzón-Sandoval, J, Hoolachan, JM, Hammond, SM, Abendroth, F et al.. Combining multiomics and drug perturbation profiles to identify muscle-specific treatments for spinal muscular atrophy. JCI Insight. 2021.6 (13) PMID:34236053
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