The 2023 Sir Philip Randle Lecture will be awarded to Guy Rutter. Guy is a principal research fellow at the Research Centre CHUM, University of Montreal, Professor of Cell Biology at Imperial College London and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological College, Singapore.

Professor Rutter undertook a PhD on the hormonal control of mitochondrial metabolism with Prof Dick Denton FRS in the Department of Biochemistry first established by Sir Philip Randle at Bristol University, U.K. He then won an MRC Travelling Fellowship to study insulin secretion under Claes Wollheim in Geneva, in collaboration with Tullio Pozzan and Rosario Rizzuto in Padua. He returned to Bristol in 1993, moved to Imperial in 2006 to establish the Section of Cell Biology, and joined the University of Montreal in Canada in 2021.

His current research focusses on diabetes mellitus, a condition which currently affects almost 10 % of the adult population worldwide. His chief goals are to develop new means to enhance insulin secretion in Type 2 diabetes by studying the fundamental signalling pathways through which glucose, incretins and other hormones act on the pancreatic β cell. He deploys knowledge flowing from genome-wide and other genetic studies for this disease, and state-of-the-art technologies ranging from mouse models through genome editing, electrophysiology, super-resolution imaging, optogenetics, transcriptomics and proteomics.

Guy said: “This award means a lot to me, having known Sir Philip personally, and studied under one of his own students (Denton)!  I’m also pleased that the lecture will allow me to present some of our work on insulin secretion, an area in which Sir Philip made important contributions.”

Guy presented his Award Lecture at the European Islet Study Group meeting between 19-21 June 2023 in Vancouver, Canada.

Read Guy's article published in the Biochemical Journal - Mitochondrial metabolism and dynamics in pancreatic beta cell glucose sensing

The 2019 Sir Philip Randle Lecture was awarded to Antonio Vidal-Puig from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge, UK. Antonio’s research focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms linking obesity with insulin resistance, diabetes and cardiometabolic complications and on the development of related therapeutic strategies. His research strategies include a combination of hypothesis driven and non-biased systems approaches that make extensive use of animal models, stem cell biology, human biological samples (including induced pluripotent stem cells), sophisticated omics technologies and bioinformatics integration. Vidal-Puig’s lab creativity is reflected in the “adipose tissue expandability hypothesis” and the concept of “lipotoxicity” to explain the association between obesity and cardiometabolic complications. His specific scientific contributions to four lines of research are: 1. defining the adipose tissue expandability and lipotoxicity hypothesis and the relevance of adipose tissue macrophages mediating adipose tissue inflammation; 2. proposing the use of energy dissipating strategies to reverse lipotoxicity by promoting mitochondrial biogenesis, mitochondrial uncoupling and brown fat differentiation and activation; 3. establishing the relevance of hypothalamic lipid metabolism in controlling energy homeostasis and thyroid hormone and BMP8b controlling brown fat activation and 4. the pioneering use of systems biology and stem cell approaches to elucidate the role of specific lipids and networks in the development the cardiometabolic syndrome. 

Of winning the Sir Philip Randle Lecture, Antonio said “I am delighted with this award that recognises the excellent work of the members of my laboratory over the years”.

Antonio presented his award lecture at the Biochemical Society and World Obesity Federation joint conference ‘Maternal obesity and pre-eclampsia: common pathways’ on 5-6 November 2019 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The 2017 Sir Philip Randle Lecture was awarded to Geoffrey D Holman from University of Bath. Geoffrey has made a major contribution to the field of insulin regulated glucose metabolism, principally the mechanism by which glucose enters cells in response to insulin stimulation through a regulated transporter translocation mechanism. His work has direct impact on our understanding of human insulin-resistant state and the development of Type 2 Diabetes. 

Read Geoffrey's article published in the Biochemical Journal - Chemical biology probes of mammalian GLUT structure and function. 

Geoffrey presented his award lecture at the Society conference entitled ‘Insulin and exercise signalling for glucose homeostasis and metabolic health‘ on 6-8 September 2017 at the University of Bath, UK. 

The Sir Philip Randle Lecture will be presented to Professor Sonia Rocha in 2025. Sonia, originally from northern Portugal, earned her Biology degree at the University of Porto, with emphasis on plant physiology. She then completed a PhD at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland, focusing on ionizing radiation-induced apoptosis in the group of Professor Martin Pruschy and Professor Kasper Winterhalter. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Dundee, Scotland, exploring tumour suppressor interactions with NF-kappaB transcription factors in the group of Professor Neil Perkins. In 2005, she started as a Tenure Track Principal Investigator at the University of Dundee, delving into hypoxia research. Recognized with Tenure in 2010 and a Cancer Research-UK Senior Research Fellowship in 2011, she later became deputy director of the Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2013, before being promoted to full Professor in 2016. In 2017, she assumed leadership of the Biochemistry department at the University of Liverpool, eventually becoming Executive Dean for the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology in May 2020. Sonia actively engages in teaching, mentoring, and public outreach, while also contributing to scientific committees, academic journal editing, and conference organization.

Sonia said: "It is an honour to receive this award, also as the first female recipient. I would like to thank all the members of my team past and present, the scientific community in areas we work in, and all my mentors throughout my career. This award highlights our work in how cells change in response to reduced oxygen availability, a master regulator of metabolism. We will continue to investigate this response, which is so important for health and disease across all multicellular organisms."

The 2023 Heatley Medal and Prize will be awarded to Professor Nicola Curtin. Nicola is Professor of Experimental Cancer Therapeutics at Newcastle University where she began her post-doctoral career in 1982. 

Her research focusses on the development of anti-cancer drugs, particularly against the DNA Damage Response optimising their use, including identification of potential predictive biomarkers. Her greatest contribution is to the development of the PARP inhibitor (PARPi), rucaparib (Rubraca®) and the identification of the synthetic lethality of PARPi in tumours defective in the Homologous Recombination DNA repair pathway. PARPis are a major breakthrough in the treatment of ovarian cancer and are also approved for other cancer types. She was awarded the Robert R. Ruffolo Career Achievement Award in Pharmacology by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics in 2021 for her work. She enjoys enthusing and mentoring her PhD students, clinical fellows and ECRs. She is Editor in Chief of Expert Reviews in Molecular Medicine, working with a team of young and enthusiastic editors.

Nicola said: “The Heatley Medal is special to me because I am driven by both scientific curiosity and a desire to use this work to improve human health and, like Norman Heatley, I recognise that luck and teamwork has contributed to the success of this work.”

Nicola presented her Award Lecture at Deubiquitylases and Ubl-proteases: from fundamental principles to therapeutic opportunities between 19-21 June 2023.

Read Nicola's article published in Biochemical Society Transactions - Targeting the DNA damage response for cancer therapy

The 2020 Heatley Medal and Prize was awarded to Professor James Barber of Imperial College London, UK. 

James is a senior research investigator and Emeritus Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. He is also Visiting Canon Professor to the School of Material Science and Engineering (MSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. The focus of his research has been the investigation of photosynthesis and the functional role of the photosystems with emphasis on their molecular structures. Much of his work has focused on Photosystem II, a biological machine able to use light energy to split water into oxygen and reducing equivalents. He reported the first fully refined X-ray structure of this enzyme in 2004. More recently, he has turned his attention from natural to artificial photosynthesis and the production of renewable energy based on the capture and storage of solar energy. To do so he has collaborated with chemists, electrochemists and material scientists to develop appropriate and novel technology. Much of this work has been spurred by the establishment of the Solar Fuels Laboratory within the School of Material Sciences at NTU. James has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Member of the Academia Europaea, Selby Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society and his work has been recognized by a number of UK and international prizes, including the Biochemical Society Novartis Medal and Prize. 

James said: “I feel extremely honoured to be awarded the Heatley Medal and Prize. I share this honour with all those who have worked with me over the years. I particularly wish to acknowledge my colleagues in the School of Material Sciences and Engineering at NTU, Singapore with whom I am working on electrochemical systems to mimic natural photosynthesis. The overall challenge is to capture  solar energy efficiently and store it in chemical bonds without carbonisation (for example as hydrogen). This is a daunting problem on a global scale but must be solved to sustain ordered human society into the future. As the Sir Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College, it is appropriate for me to recognise that Norman Heatley, a colleague of Ernst Chain at Oxford, was a key contributor to the discovery and application of penicillin. It has been surmised that he also deserved the 1945 Nobel Prize along with Ernst Chain, Alexander Fleming and Howard Flory. However the Nobel prize for Medicine or Physiology is limited to three recipients in any one year. I am therefore particularly proud to receive this medal which recognises Heatley’s contributions to one of the major discoveries in medical sciences, one which has saved billions of lives.”

The 2017 Heatley Medal and Prize was awarded to Ian Graham from the University of York. During his career Ian has made major contributions to our understanding of plant metabolism and seed biology. Transformative research has shed new light on the production of small molecule natural products from plants such as the anti-cancer compound noscapine, morphinan-based analgesics such as codeine and morphine and the antimalarial drug artemisinin. He led the way in the genetic dissection of lipid mobilization in Arabidopsis oilseeds and most recently has discovered a role for oxylipins in controlling seed germination.

Ian presented his lecture at the 2017 Local Ambassador Day on 16 November 2017.

The 2014 Heatley Medal and Prize was awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian from the University of Cambridge, UK. Shankar Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised leader in the field of nucleic acids who is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology. He has made seminal contributions to the identification, elucidation and manipulation of non-coding genetic elements, particularly four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. His work on the intervention of nucleic acid function using small molecules has revealed a number of molecular mechanisms that can be exploited, e.g., to modulate the biology of cancer.

Read Shankar's article in Biochemical Society Transactions - Decoding genomes.