Departmental homepageProfessor Graham Ladds studied Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham before completing a PhD in yeast pheromone signalling at the University of Warwick. He progressed through the ranks at Warwick to become an Associate Professor before leaving in 2015 to join the Department of Pharmacology at Cambridge, also being elected to a Fellowship at St John’s College. In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society. In 2022 he was promoted to a full Professor in his Department. His research group (consisting of 17 members) uses a combination of pharmacological investigations and mathematical modelling to study factors that control agonist bias at G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). These investigations have enabled him to foster strong collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry (GSK, Takada and Firmenich), which have recently been enhanced though him being awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship to collaborate with AstraZeneca. He has also been a contributor/inventor on three patents and co-founder a small spinout company.
Professor Ladds has more than 15 years' experience in teaching both undergraduate Medical/Veterinary and Biomedical/Natural Sciences students. He lectures on drug-receptor interactions and incretin pharmacology/treatments for diabetes. He is Director of Studies for Pharmacology at St John's. He has also been involved in course organisation, admissions, curriculum redesign and acted as external examiner at the Universities of Birmingham, Northampton and Kuwait.
His research group applies a range of luminescent approaches to probe, at the molecular level, the basis of agonist-mediated signalling bias for G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the leading target for therapeutic intervention in the pharmaceutical industry. The techniques are a multi-disciplinary approach and combine in vivo experimentation with computational modelling and machine-learning.
Marti-Solano, M., Crilly, S.E., Malinverni, D., … Ladds, G. … Babu, M.M. (2020) Combinatorial expression of functionally distinct GPCR isoforms can diversify receptor signalling response. Nature 588(7838):E24.
Shaw, W.M., Yamauchi, H., Mead, J., Gowers, G.F., Oling, D., Larsson, N., Wigglesworth, M.*, Ladds, G.* & Ellis, T.* (2019) Engineering a model cell for rational tuning of GPCR signalling Cell. 177: 782-796. (* co-corresponding authors)
Jones, A., ... Ladds, G. & Nietlispach, D. (2024) Structurally similar G protein complexes with β1-adrenergic receptor active state show differential binding kinetics, mediating selectivity. Nat Comms. 15, 1334.
Clark, A.J., Mullooly, N., Safitri, D., Harris, M., de Vries, T., MassenVanDenBrink, A., Poyner, D.R., Gianni, D., Wigglesworth, M. & Ladds. G. (2021) CGRP, adrenomedullin and adrenomedullin 2 display endogenous GPCR agonist bias in primary human cardiovascular cells. Commun. Biol. 4:776.
