Professor John Wood FMedSci FRS

Professor John N. Wood BSc, MSc, PhD, DSc, FRS graduated from Leeds University and studied Virology at Warwick University. He moved to the Institut Pasteur in 1976 to work as a postdoctoral fellow with Luc Montagnier on Interferons,  before transitioning to Neuroscience thanks to meeting Tom Jessell.  He worked for 12 years in Industry (Wellcome Foundation and Sandoz Institute). With a brilliant post-doc, Armen Akopian, he  identified a number of new analgesic targets in studies of transgenic mice. An ATP-gated channel  (P2X3) is the  target of a drug called Gefapixant in honour of Geoff Burnstock. He  also cloned a sodium channel named Nav1.8 that is  important for human pain. This channel is only  found in sensory neurons  and Wood demonstrated with knockout mice that this was a key  pain target. He  identified compounds that blocked the channel and were analgesic.  Vertex have subsequently produced an orally active channel blocker -  Journavx or Suzetrigine that is FDA approved and in the clinic as analgesic. John has earlier founded Ionix Pharmaceuticals, to make Nav1.8 channel blockers in 2002 without success.   In 2009 he was elected to the Royal Society and won the Grand Prix Scientifique of the Institut de France. More recently, he and others showed that Nav1.7, another sodium channel, plays a key role in human pain, and explained the mechanism behind this, but the genetic basis of pain loss (with compensatory expression of other channels) does not translate into useful therapeutics because of bad side effects.  His recent work focusses on chemogenetic studies of cancer pain.