Ryan Hibbs, chair and professor of neurobiology and professor of pharmacology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, will deliver an Apex Lecture on March 27, 2025, at 4:00 p.m. in 1220 MRB III. The title of his talk is, “Muscle Acetylcholine Receptors in Development and Disease.” A reception will follow the lecture at 5:00 p.m. in the MRB III first-floor atrium.
Hibbs studied chemistry and biochemistry at Whitman College, a small liberal arts college in Washington State, graduating in 2000. He did his Ph.D. research at UC San Diego with Palmer Taylor in 2001–2006 and his postdoctoral research with Eric Gouaux at the Vollum institute in 2007–2012. Hibbs started his independent lab in 2012 in the departments of neuroscience and biophysics at UT Southwestern Medical School and was promoted to associate professor in 2019. In 2023 he moved his research lab to UC San Diego, but he maintains an adjunct appointment in neuroscience at UT Southwestern.
Awards and honors include Klingenstein and McKnight Scholar awards, the UC San Diego Outstanding Alumnus Award, the Alton Ochsner Award Relating Smoking and Disease, and the Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research.
The Hibbs lab investigates the fine details of fast communication in the nervous system, how this signaling goes awry in disease, and how drugs alter it. Ongoing projects span basic biophysics, structural biology, neuropharmacology, mechanisms underlying autoimmune diseases of the nervous system, and the evolution of neurotransmitter receptors.
The laboratory is pursuing structural mechanisms of neurotransmitter receptor function and relationships to disease pathology, with a current focus on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and GABAA receptors. We bring complementary methods to bear on the study of these receptors, including structural biology, pharmacology, and electrophysiology, and frequently collaborate with simulation experts, synthetic chemists, and clinicians. Long-term goals include understanding neurotransmitter receptor evolution, defining details in how they are targeted in autoimmune diseases, and enabling drug design relevant to addiction, mental illness, epilepsy, autoimmunity, and neurodegeneration.
Lecture abstract
We are broadly interested in how ion channels enable fast signaling across membranes. This signaling underlies diverse physiological processes, from chemical transmission in the brain, to muscle contraction, to environmental sensation. In the seminar, I will discuss recent work from our lab on how connections between our nervous system and skeletal muscle develop, and how, in cases of autoimmune disease, these junctions are attacked. I will cover how we purified micrograms of muscle receptor protein from kilograms of bovine muscle (beef) to yield high-resolution structures of the acetylcholine receptor, then used electrophysiology to understand development of this synapse. In the second part of the seminar, I will show how we are using structural and functional methods to map epitopes for pathogenic patient antibodies and understand mechanisms underlying the autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis.
About the Apex Lecture Series
There are major inflection points in biomedical discovery that create new fields, new ideas, and new opportunities to impact human health. To engage with global researchers contributing to these inflection points, the Vanderbilt School of Medicine Basic Sciences launched the Apex Lecture Series in 2023. This school-wide seminar series brings scientists who are influencing the trajectory of their fields to engage with our scientific community on campus.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Medicine Basic Sciences, the Department of Pharmacology, and the Center for Applied AI in Protein Dynamics.