Antony Galione


Antony Giuseppe Galione is professor of Pharmacology and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford.

Education

Galione was educated at Felsted School in Essex and Trinity College, Cambridge where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences in 1985 followed by a PhD in 1989 for research on calcium signalling in the blowfly salivary gland supervised by Michael Berridge.

Research and career

Galione's research investigates calcium signalling. HC Lee established the concept of multiple calcium mobilising messengers which link cell surface stimuli to release of internal calcium stores, while Zhu, Evans and co-workers identified their target two-pore channels and organelles. This has enhanced our understanding of how calcium as a ubiquitous cellular regulator may control a myriad of cellular processes with precision.
Galione established that cyclic ADP-ribose regulates calcium-induced calcium release and globalisation of calcium signals, and that Nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate is a ubiquitous trigger for initiating and co-ordinating calcium signals, often involving communication between organelles at contact sites.
By developing novel pharmacological, molecular and physiological approaches, he has demonstrated that these messengers and their targets regulate many fundamental pathophysiological cellular processes as diverse as Ebola virus disease infection, fertilisation and embryology, cardiac contractility, T cell activation and neuronal excitability. The discovery of lysosomes as calcium stores mobilised by NAADP has identified an entirely new signalling role for these organelles in health and disease.
Galione served as head of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford from 2006 until 2015.

Awards and honours

Galione was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2010 a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016. He was awarded the Novartis Prize from the British Pharmacological Society in 2001.