I am extremely grateful and very proud to have been awarded a New Investigator Grant from the MRC. Motor neurone disease is a devastating condition that up until now, has largely been studied from a neurological perspective whereas skeletal muscle, one of the most prominently affected tissues, has received disproportionately low research attention. The support from the MRC will allow our lab to apply novel methodologies that we have developed over the last ~5 years, to study motor neurone disease from a muscle perspective, giving us a greater opportunity to provide novel insights into the disease.
Dr Robert Seaborne, Lecturer in Muscle Biology in the Centre for Human & Applied Physiological Sciences.
13 August 2025
Dr Robert Seaborne awarded Medical Research Council New Investigator Grant
Dr Robert Seaborne from the School of Basic & Medical Biosciences at King’s has received a New Investigator Grant from the UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC), designed to help emerging researchers establish their own independent labs. The £890,000 award will support Dr Seaborne’s work focused on understanding the role of skeletal muscle in motor neurone disease.
Amyotrophic Laterals Sclerosis (ALS) is a serious and fatal condition in which the nerve cells that control movement (motor neurons) break down. It is the most common motor neurone disease. For many years, research on ALS has largely focused on nerve cells, holding to the view that the condition is purely neuron-driven, with muscle problems seen as a secondary side effect of the disease. However, there is growing evidence that skeletal muscle, the muscle type that facilitates movement and locomotion, may play a more active role in ALS, potentially even helping to trigger or accelerate the disease.
Dr Seaborne will use the MRC research grant to look at how different types of muscle fibres are affected in ALS, and whether these changes happen earlier than previously believed, even before symptoms or nerve damage become obvious.
To do this, Dr Seaborne has created a new method called Single Myofiber Multi-Function Omics (SMyoMFO). This technique allows scientists to study four different kinds of information from a single muscle fibre, including how the muscle fibre functions and how its genes and proteins behave. This makes it possible to get a much clearer and more detailed picture of muscle fibres than traditional methods, which either don’t capture information on individual cell types or can only generate one kind of data.
By understanding how muscle fibres change in ALS and identifying these changes early, researchers may be able to develop new ways to slow or stop the disease. If skeletal muscle is found to play a key role in ALS, future treatments could focus on protecting or repairing muscle, offering patients new options beyond therapies that target nerves.
The methods used in this research could also be applied to other muscle-related diseases, creating further opportunities for discovery research and treatment.
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