Dr. Stephen Traynelis
Dr. Stephen Traynelis is a Professor of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology and a Dean’s Eminent Investigator at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA. He is the founding Director of the Center for Functional Evaluation of Rare Variants. His work embodies four goals: (i) to elucidate the mechanism of activation for glutamate receptors, (ii) to understand ion channel function as a contributor to neurological and neuropsychiatric disease, (iii) to use medicinal chemistry to develop a new generation of allosteric modulators of glutamate receptors as both tools and new therapeutics and (iv) to exploit the tremendous advances in genetics and personalized medicine to improve treatment of patients with neuropathological conditions.
Dr. Traynelis has provided an in-depth understanding of glutamate receptor function and developed multiple first-in-class series of subtype-selective NMDA receptor allosteric modulators that possess therapeutic potential for the treatment of ischemic brain injury, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. This led to the founding of NeurOp Inc. and the development of neuroprotective agents, one of which has completed Phase 1 clinical trials and is poised to enter Phase 2 testing. Some of these new allosteric modulators have enabled structural analysis of glutamate receptors and have been used to identify new features of neuronal circuitry. These agents have also advanced our understanding of basic glutamate receptor function. Dr. Traynelis’ work utilizes a multidisciplinary approach combining a set of in vitro functional assays and in vivo studies on transgenic (knock-in) animal models to understand the functional consequences of genetic variation in glutamate receptor genes in healthy individuals and patients. These efforts led to the founding of a new Center at Emory that is collaborating with over 100 university hospitals and medical centers worldwide. The resulting data has provided new insights into receptor function and genetic risk, and bridges the gap between genetic information on receptor variants and their functional and pharmacological consequences, laying the groundwork for precision medicine and the evaluation of novel treatment paradigms. Work by the Center has established a precedent in the categorization of functional consequences of missense variation that is being used broadly to interpret genetic variation in multiple gene families.
Dr. Traynelis received a BS from West Virginia University in Chemistry (1984, summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of North Carolina (1988). He completed postdoctoral fellowships at University College London and the Salk Institute and joined the faculty at Emory in 1994. Dr. Traynelis is a John Merck Scholar, an AAAS Fellow, an ASPET Fellow, and former editor-in-chief of Molecular Pharmacology, as well as the recipient of an NIH Javits Award, an R35 Research Program Award, and the Hodgkin-Huxley-Katz Prize. He is a co-author on 250 peer-reviewed papers (Google Scholar H-index of 89 with over 34,500 citations; https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=M7iZ6o4AAAAJ), book chapters, invited commentaries, a co-inventor on 10 US patents, and has developed several widely used software packages. He has given over 190 invited lectures.