Macdonald Christie

Biography

Professor Macdonald (Mac) Christie is a neuropharmacologist, an internationally renowned electrophysiologist and expert in ion channel and synaptic physiology and pharmacology and the leading basic opioid pharmacologist in the nation. He leads a research team that studies cellular and molecular mechanisms in opioid receptor signaling in pain pathways, the biological basis of adaptations that produce chronic pain and drug dependence, and is Chief Investigator on a NHMRC Program grant involving preclinical development of novel pain therapeutics. Professor Christie is internationally renowned for his studies on ion channel function and neural network plasticity in nervous system disorders such as chronic pain and drug dependence. His research is fundamentally important given the increasing use of opioids to manage moderate to severe chronic pain is complicated by adverse effects such as tolerance, opioid dependence and in some cases, addiction. Misuse and/or inappropriate prescription of opioids are added problems. Increasing the understanding of mechanisms involved in the generation of chronic pain and in the analgesic and adverse effects of opioids (including why/how opioids produce withdrawal symptoms), will pave the way for developing newer therapies that divert signals toward pathways that produce pain relief but with lower rates of adverse effects. Professor Christie is a past Director (Basic Research) and Professor at the Pain Management Research Institute, Royal North Shore Hospital, and Director of Pain and Addiction Research at the Brain and Mind Research Institute, University of Sydney. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and of the Sydney Cancer Institute and member of the NSW Tissue Resource Centre Management Committee.

Research Interest

Professor Christie’s research has heralded numerous ‘firsts’. He contributed to the first cloning of the D2 dopamine receptor (Nature) and achieved the first expression of a mammalian voltage-gated potassium channel (Science), and first functional demonstration of its heteropolymerisation (Neuron). His later research uncovered the mechanisms of plasticity of G-protein receptor coupling in neurons that are transforming thinking regarding opioid tolerance and ion channel plasticity in chronic pain states. His group discovered that µ and δ opioid receptors in nerve cells share common G-Protein receptor coupling mechanisms and provided the first evidence of direct coupling of µ-receptors to GIRK channels and of coupling of the opioid-related receptor ORL1, to GIRK channels in brain as well as in cannabinoid signaling. He discovered a novel signalling mechanism for G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCR) in synapses in brain (Nature). This provided a basis for seminal findings on plasticity of signaling in opioid withdrawal published in Neuron (2005) and recently in Nature Neuroscience (2011).