Dr. Frances Platt

Biography

Professor Frances Platt is the Head of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. She received her BSc in Zoology from Imperial College, University of London, and obtained her PhD in animal physiology from the University of Bath. Platt's career includes a post-doctoral fellowship at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, USA, before returning to the UK in 1989 to work in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Oxford. Her research has significantly advanced the understanding of lysosomal storage disorders, focusing on the abnormal accumulation of glycosphingolipids and their resulting pathology. She played a pivotal role in the development of substrate reduction therapy (SRT) for treating these disorders, establishing proof of principle in mouse models primarily for neurodegenerative diseases. In collaboration with Dr. Terry Butters, she contributed to the development of the approved drug miglustat/Zavesca for glycosphingolipid storage disease therapy. Her current research interests include cell biology, pathobiology of glycosphingolipids, and the development of novel therapies for diseases arising from glycolipid metabolism defects and lysosomal dysfunction. Platt was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2011 and received the Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award in 2013. In 2016, she became a Wellcome Trust Investigator in Science and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. In 2023, she was awarded the Thudichum Medal by the Biochemical Society in the UK.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards