Fiona Pixley is a medically trained scientist with an MBBS(Hons) from the University of Western Australia and a DPhil in Clinical Medicine/Epidemiology from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
After 5 years of clinical work in Oxford and London hospitals and Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (UK), she returned to biomedical research. With the understanding that the use of molecular approaches was critical in the understanding of disease aetiologies, she spent a year learning molecular biological techniques at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford.
Dr Pixley subsequently worked with Richard Stanley at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York on the identification of tyrosine phosphorylation and CSF-1 regulation of macrophage adhesion and motility.
In 2007 she moved back to the University of Western Australia to start up her own laboratory in the School of Medicine and Pharmacology.
Key research
Dr Pixley’s laboratory is focussed on the role of the CSF-1 receptor signalling and tyrosine phosphorylation in the activation of downstream signal transduction pathways that regulate macrophage adhesion and motility.
Compared with more commonly studied yet less motile cell types such as fibroblasts, motility is regulated quite differently in the professionally motile macrophage.
A broad range of microscopic and biochemical techniques is employed in the laboratory to dissect the mechanisms by which CSF-1 receptor tyrosine phosphorylation activates specific downstream signalling pathways to stimulate macrophage motility.
Dr Pixley also collaborates extensively to investigate the role of other tyrosine phosphorylated proteins, such as FAK, Pyk2 and cortactin, that are important in the regulation of macrophage differentiation, adhesion and motility.
Macrophage infiltration into tissues contributes to the deterioration of a number of diseases, including tumour metastasis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Examination of macrophage-specific adhesion and motility proteins and their relevant signalling pathways should help to identify potential therapeutic targets in these diseases.
- Company:The University of Western Australia
- Short Bio:School of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
- http://www.web.uwa.edu.au/people/fiona.pixley