Michael J Wedemeyer, PhD
Department of Pharmacology
Dr. Wedemeyer is a postdoctoral researcher working under the guidance of Dr. William P Clarke and Dr. Kelly A Berg at UTHSCSA. Their research is focused on understanding how drugs interact with opioid receptors with the goal of developing pain-relieving drugs without the addictive side effects of many opioids.
CONTACT INFO:
RESEARCH AREAS
- G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs)
- Computational molecular modeling
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Wedemeyer received his bachelor’s degree in BioMolecular Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2015. During his final year, he led a research team of four students working on developing a novel drug delivery system to the colon. This work was published along with a follow up manuscript describing potential use of their hydrogels as artificial red blood cells. After graduation, he attended the Medical College of Wisconsin where he discovered his interest in structural biology. Dr. Wedemeyer joined the lab of Dr. Brian Volkman and investigated chemokine-receptor interactions via NMR and cell-based assays. After he attended a bootcamp for learning the Rosetta molecular modeling suite, he spent a month in the lab of Dr. Jens Meiler at Vanderbilt University to jumpstart his development of a Rosetta protocol to model chemokine-bound receptors. The capstone of his PhD work involved combining bioinformatics and in vitro experiments to investigate how the two main chemokine subfamilies selectively bind their receptors.
PUBLICATIONS
Wedemeyer MJ, Mueller BK, Bender BJ, Meiler J, & Volkman BF (2020). Comparative modeling and docking of chemokine-receptor interactions with Rosetta. Biochemical and biophysical research communications. PMID31924303.
Wedemeyer MJ, Mahn SA, Getschman AE, Crawford KS, Peterson FC, Marchese A, McCorvy JD, & Volkman BF (2020). The chemokine X-factor: Structure-function analysis of the CXC motif at CXCR4 and ACKR3. The Journal of biological chemistry. PMID32788219.
Stealey S, Guo X, Majewski R, Dyble A, Lehman K, Wedemeyer M, Steeber DA, Kaltchev MG, Chen J, & Zhang W (2020). Calcium-oligochitosan-pectin microcarrier for colonic drug delivery. Pharmaceutical development and technology. PMID31709858.
Wedemeyer MJ, Mueller BK, Bender BJ, Meiler J, & Volkman BF (2019). Modeling the complete chemokine-receptor interaction. Methods in cell biology. PMID30616825.
Holl K, He H, Wedemeyer M, Clopton L, Wert S, Meckes JK, Cheng R, Kastner A, Palmer AA, Redei EE, & Solberg Woods LC. (2018). Heterogeneous stock rats: a model to study the genetics of despair-like behavior in adolescence. Genes, brain, and behavior. PMID28834208.
Zhang W, Bissen MJ, Savela ES, Clausen JN, Fredricks SJ, Guo X, Paquin ZR, Dohn RP, Pavelich IJ, Polovchak AL, Wedemeyer MJ, Shilling BE, Dufner EN, O'Donnell AC, Rubio G, Readnour LR, Brown TF, Lee JC, Kaltchev MG, Chen J, Tritt CS. (2016). Design of artificial red blood cells using polymeric hydrogel microcapsules: hydrogel stability improvement and polymer selection. The International journal of artificial organs. PMID27886350.