Professor Benjamin Housden

About me:

My research is focussed on using interdisciplinary methods to study how genetic mutations lead to disease. This involves a combination of new technology development and high-throughput genetic screening to analyse gene functions and to identify and characterise candidate drugs to treat diseases. The development of new methods to identify effective drugs is vitally important because current methods suffer from a high failure rate that slows the development of new therapies.

Research in our group is focused on developing new methods and technologies to allow more sensitive and higher throughput genetic screens to be performed. This includes optimisation of screening methods via the application of liquid handling automation, development of new molecular biology techniques to enhance the performance of genetic tools and the application of machine learning to better analyse screen data. Together, these advances will allow us to perform larger and more reliable screens, which can be applied to both fundamental biological investigations and drug-discovery.

In addition, we have several ongoing projects to apply the new screening methods that we develop to identify new drug-targets for human diseases. We are currently working on Tuberous Sclerosis Complex, Neurofibromatosis type 1, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and several mutations linked to sporadic cancers.

• Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 2010
• M.A., University of Cambridge, 2005

Dr. Housden began his research career in the laboratory of Professor Sarah Bray at the University of Cambridge. There, he studied the direct transcriptional outputs of Notch signaling and crosstalk with the EGFR pathway using Drosophila as a model system. For his postdoctoral work, he joined Professor Norbert Perrimon’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Here, his interest in gene networks led him to develop new genetic screening methods to identify genes that could be targeted to treat human diseases. Since joining the Living Systems Institute in 2017, Dr. Housden’s laboratory has focused on developing new methods to enhance their ability to identify new therapeutic targets for disease and applying these methods for drug discovery.

Employment history:

• Associate Professor - University of Exeter; 05/2021 to present
• Research Fellow - University of Exeter; 04/2017 to 05/2021
• Postdoctoral Fellow - Harvard Medical School; 09/2011 to 03/2017
• Postdoctoral Fellow - University of Cambridge; 12/2010 to 08/2011