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Nicolas Audet
PhD, Post-doctoral fellow fello |
I earned a BSc (Biology with
a specialization in Ecology) at Université du Québec à
Montréal in 2000. After that, I brewed beer for the next
three years before startin a MSc in Pharmacology in Dr.
Graciela Pineyro’s lab (associated with Université de
Montreal). In the first year of my MSc, I switched to the
PhD program. During my graduate studies, I worked on the
concept of functional selectivity of GPCR ligands, with the
b-opioid receptor (DOR) as a model. I demonstrated
that different ligands can stabilize distinct active
conformations of the DOR (Audet et al, 2008) and that these
conformations can be distinctively regulated to increase or
avoid tolerance to analgesia (Audet et al, 2012). My thesis
was chosen by the Department of Pharmacology at Université
de Montréal as the best thesis of 2012.
I joined Terry’s lab in
February 2012 as a postdoctoral fellow. In the last few
years, researchers have found that GPCRs such as the
b-adrenergic receptor are not only at the cell
surface but are also localized to the nuclear membrane. This
discovery has the potential to have a significant impact on
drug discovery, especially on
b-blockers and cardiac drugs. Therefore, I started my
fellowship with the goal of finding the roles of
b-adrenergic receptor on the nuclear membrane.
