LemBix Lab

Neural Regeneration

Lab Contact Information

Vance Lemmon, Ph.D.
Walter G. Ross Distinguished Chair in Developmental Neuroscience
Professor of Neurological Surgery
The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis
Institute for Data Science and Computing
Univ. of Miami Miller School of Medicine
1095 NW 14th Ter.
LPLC, RM 4-16, R-48
Miami, Fl 33136-1060

We use different kinds of strategies to look for molecular targets to promote nerve regeneration. Kinases regulate most aspects of cell function. As they are very important in cancer, there are many drugs and compounds as well as cDNA and RNAi libraries that can be used to perturb the Kinome. Neuroscientists should exploit these resources.

We have done a large overexpression screen in primary hippocampal neurons (Buchser et al, 2010). Besides identifying interesting individual targets for further study, we did pathway analysis and gene ontology analysis based on the phenotypic data. Guess what? Cancer pathways are very important in regulating neurite growth.

More recently we are using kinase inhibitors (KIs) to identify target (those to inhibit) and liability (those to avoid) kinases to promote regeneration (Al-Ali et al, 2013, 2015, 2017; Beckerman et al, 2015, Patel et al, 2020). This work exploits polypharmacology and KI biochemical profiling data, Maximum Relevance algorithms and Support Vector Machines, followed by RNAi to design a small but informative list of kinases that can be used to predict whether a new compound will enhance neurite growth.