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Philip Ingham

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Professor
Philip Ingham
FRS FMedSci
Personal details
Born
Philip William Ingham

(1955-03-19) 19 March 1955 (age 69)
Liverpool, England
OccupationGeneticist

Philip William Ingham (born 19 March 1955, Liverpool) is a British geneticist, currently the Toh Kian Chui Distinguished Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a partnership between Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Imperial College, London. Previously, he was the inaugural Director of the Living Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, UK[1] and prior to that was Vice Dean, Research at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine.[2]

Career

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Ingham was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby[3] near Liverpool and then at Queens' College, Cambridge,[citation needed] where after initially reading Philosophy and Theology he graduated in Genetics. He gained his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Sussex under the supervision of J Robert S Whittle[4] before moving to the Laboratoire de Génétique Moleculaire des Eukaryotes in Strasbourg, France, as a Royal Society European Exchange Programme fellow. He returned to the UK in 1982, joining the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF, now known as Cancer Research UK) as a post-doctoral research fellow in the laboratory of David Ish-Horowicz. After a brief spell as a Research Scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge,[5] he re-joined the ICRF as a staff scientist, remaining there for ten years before moving to the University of Sheffield, where he established the MRC Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics.[6] He was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1995,[7] a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002.[8] In 2005, he became the second recipient of the Medal of the Genetics Society of Great Britain[9] and in 2007 was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He has served on numerous international Scientific Advisory Boards and funding committees and was President of the International Society of Developmental Biologists from 2013-2017. In 2014 he was awarded the Waddington Medal by the British Society for Developmental Biology.[10] He has lived and worked in Singapore since 2005.

Scientific contributions

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As a graduate student, Ingham isolated a novel homoeotic mutation in Drosophila, which he named trithorax (trx).[11] Using genetic mosaic analysis, he showed that the trx gene is required for the maintenance of the determined state of cells,[12] presaging the current understanding of the Trithorax-group proteins as key epigenetic regulators throughout the animal kingdom. Subsequently, he pioneered the molecular analysis of the process of segmentation in the Drosophila embryo, through the simultaneous analysis the expression of patterns of pair rule genes using the technique of in situ hybridisation.[13] These studies led to his interest in what is now known as the Hedgehog signalling pathway; Ingham's genetic studies identified the core components of this pathway[14] and in particular the role of the Patched protein as the receptor for the Hedgehog ligand.[15] In 1993, in collaboration with Andy McMahon and Cliff Tabin, Ingham's research group discovered the vertebrate homologues of the Drosophila hedgehog gene, including Sonic hedgehog.[16] This finding set in train a surge of interest in this pathway, leading amongst other things, to the recognition of its role in a number of human cancers and to the development of a novel anti-cancer drug that specifically targets the pathway.[17] Ingham was in the vanguard of researchers to adopt the zebrafish, Danio rerio, as a model for the analysis of vertebrate development and more recently for the study of processes related to human diseases.

Publications

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Ingham has authored or co-authored over 180 peer-reviewed scientific primary research papers and review articles. Notable amongst the latter are his 1988 review of the Molecular Genetics of embryonic Pattern formation in Drosophila[18] and his 2001 review, co-authored with Andrew McMahon, on the Principles and Paradigms of Hedgehog signalling.[19]

References

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  1. ^ "Living Systems Institute | Living Systems Institute | University of Exeter".
  2. ^ "Welcome to nginx". Archived from the original on 15 June 2014. Retrieved 15 June 2014.
  3. ^ › Alumni Career Profiles › Philip Ingham (1973 Leaver) – Professor of Developmental Biology Archived 21 November 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ List of University of Sussex alumni – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  5. ^ "LMB Alumni List".
  6. ^ Our History | The Bateson Centre Archived 8 June 2014 at archive.today
  7. ^ "EMBO members elected 1995". EMBO J. 14 (13): 3288. 1995. doi:10.1002/j.1460-2075.1995.tb07332.x. PMC 394391.
  8. ^ "2002 Royal Society Fellows".
  9. ^ Genetics Society Website > Prizes > Genetics Society Medal 2005
  10. ^ An interview with Phil Ingham
  11. ^ Ingham, Philip & Robert Whittle (1980). "Trithorax: a new homoeotic mutation of Drosophila melanogaster causing transformations of abdominal and thoracic imaginal segments". Molecular and General Genetics. 179 (3): 607–614. doi:10.1007/bf00271751. S2CID 7514185.
  12. ^ Ingham, PW (1985). "A clonal analysis of the requirement for the trithorax gene in the diversification of segments in Drosophila". Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology. 89: 349–65. PMID 4093752.
  13. ^ Howard, K & Ingham, P (1986). "Regulatory interactions between the segmentation genes fushi tarazu, hairy, and engrailed in the Drosophila blastoderm". Cell. 44 (6): 949–957. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(86)90018-8. PMID 3955654. S2CID 28770534.
  14. ^ Forbes, AJ; Nakano, Y; Taylor, AM & Ingham, PW (1993). "Genetic analysis of hedgehog signalling in the Drosophila embryo". Development. 119: 115–24. doi:10.1242/dev.119.Supplement.115. PMID 8049467.
  15. ^ Ingham, PW; Taylor, AM & Nakano, Y (1991). "Role of the Drosophila patched gene in positional signalling". Nature. 353 (6340): 184–7. Bibcode:1991Natur.353..184I. doi:10.1038/353184a0. PMID 1653906. S2CID 4361236.
  16. ^ Biologists Find Key Genes That Shape Patterning of Embryos – New York Times
  17. ^ Pin by Cancer Research UK on Skin Cancer | Pinterest
  18. ^ Ingham PW (1988). "The molecular genetics of embryonic pattern formation in Drosophila". Nature. 335 (6185): 25–34. Bibcode:1988Natur.335...25I. doi:10.1038/335025a0. PMID 2901040. S2CID 4311200.
  19. ^ Ingham PW, McMahon AP (2001). "Hedgehog signaling in animal development: paradigms and principles". Genes & Development. 15 (23): 3059–87. doi:10.1101/gad.938601. PMID 11731473.
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