Michael Wedemeyer

Education

2020 - PhD - Medical College of Wisconsin
2015 - Bachelor's - Milwaukee School of Engineering

am very interested in a family of proteins, known as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), that reside on the surface of cells. These GPCRs allow a cell to sense chemical signals in the external environment and respond accordingly. In the human body, GPCRs regulate many important functions and systems such as the immune system, the nervous system, and cell homeostasis, so it is unsurprising that over a third of FDA approved drugs target GPCRs. However, we are just starting to understand the complexity of these receptors and the mechanisms by which they affect cell responses. This gap in knowledge opens the door for unwanted side effects in drugs that target GPCRs.

Currently, I am studying drugs that either activate or block opioid GPCRs. My pharmacological training in the T32 program under Dr. William Clarke and Dr. Kelly Berg will add to my experience using computational molecular modeling to gain a more complete understanding of how drugs interact with opioid GPCRs and affect the human body. The opioid epidemic is the most infamous example of abused drugs that target GPCRs, and this research has the potential to develop pain-relieving drugs without the addictive side effects of many opioids.

Biography:

I received my bachelor’s degree in BioMolecular Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2015. During my final year I led a research team of four students working on developing a novel drug delivery system to the colon. This work was published along with a follow up manuscript describing potential use of our hydrogels as artificial red blood cells.

After graduation, I attended the Medical College of Wisconsin where I discovered my interest in structural biology. I joined the lab of Dr. Brian Volkman and investigated chemokine-receptor interactions via NMR and cell-based assays. After I attended a bootcamp for learning the Rosetta molecular modeling suite, I spent a month in the lab of Dr. Jens Meiler at Vanderbilt University to jumpstart my development of a Rosetta protocol to model chemokine-bound receptors. The capstone of my PhD work involved combining bioinformatics and in vitro experiments to investigate how the two main chemokine subfamilies selectively bind their receptors.