Mike Dragunow: breakthroughs with the brain

When Professor Mike Dragunow jokes about using his latest academic medals as fishing weights, you get a glimpse of the irreverent boy from working-class South Dunedin.

In November, the neuropharmacologist won a Royal Society Te Apārangi Hercus Medal and a New Zealand Association of Scientists Marsden Medal, recognising his lifetime contribution to researching brain disorders.

But he’s quick to share that recognition with colleagues: “It’s not just about an individual – there’s always a team,” he says.

Mike is a proud son of South Dunedin, which he describes as “not Remuera”, but a wonderful place to grow up.

He’s also proud of the medals for the sake of his parents, who missed out on schooling during World War Two. A “devout socialist”, Mike’s mother Lena left Greece during a period of right-wing rule after the war, and his father, Genady, was a displaced person from Russia. After moving to New Zealand, they worked hard in factories – Genady was a pattern maker and moulder, and Lena a seamstress.

Says Mike: “I’m very honoured by these medals, but mainly for my amazing and loving parents who committed so much for their kids.”

He has gathered a long list of achievements since he joined the University of Auckland almost 35 years ago. He was awarded the New Zealand Association of Scientists’ Research Medal in 1996, the American Academy of Periodontology’s Clinical Research Award in 2020 and the Gluckman Medal in 2022. In 2000, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

During his career he has also received more than $55 million in research grants, published more than 340 research articles and book chapters, and supervised 100-plus graduate students.

It has been a long academic journey for Mike, who spoke mainly Greek and Russian when he started primary school. He needed reading recovery support in intermediate school and (proudly) scored 64 percent in School Certificate Russian compared with 62 percent in English. Also challenging, he recalls, was growing up in a socialist family during the Cold War.

He began university in 1978, studying psychology at the University of Otago. “I was actually interested in parapsychology. I used to read books about Tibetan occultism and people who could bend spoons with their minds. Most of it was completely bonkers,” he laughs.

He ultimately went in another direction, however, and completed his PhD at Otago on epilepsy neurochemistry in 1986. His first breakthrough was in epilepsy research, showing for the first time the critical role of a neuromodulator called adenosine in stopping seizures.

During postdoctoral research in Canada, he helped discover the importance of c-Fos, the first brain chemical found to be involved in modifying genes. The brain protein is also implicated in drug addiction and builds up following seizures. He went on to discover molecular pathways of neurodegeneration and repair in the brains of people with epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“I’ve been lucky because I’ve stumbled across things that turned out to be important,” he says.

Today he’s based at the University’s Centre for Brain Research (CBR) and a short walk from three facilities he helped establish that play vital roles in advancing brain research.

He cites his greatest achievement so far as setting up the Hugh Green Biobank in 2011, supported by a “wonderful” $13.8 million donation from the Hugh Green Foundation. At the biobank, Mike and his team pioneered methods of growing human brain cells derived from generously gifted tissue from autopsy and neurosurgical brain tissue donors. The laboratory-grown patient-derived brain cells are used to test new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, motor neuron, and Huntington’s diseases, as well as epilepsy and brain cancers.

He’s proud to champion and use only lab-grown human brain cells, which he says overcome many issues related to accuracy with animal trials and also reduce the use of animals in research

While sharing images from brain-cell experiments, Mike lights up as he observes the beauty of pericytes – cells that line all the blood vessels in the brain and help form the blood brain barrier.

“We were growing pericytes without knowing what they were. No one had studied them much, but we started studying them because we were growing them,” he explains.

“More than half of our work now is on pericytes, in the hope drugs might work on them to improve the health of blood vessels and improve blood flow in the brain.”

People with Alzheimer’s experience a significant reduction in the effectiveness of their blood-brain barrier and blood vessels. The blood-brain barrier is also less robust in people with motor neuron disease and concussion.

Mike also established CBR’s tissue screening facility and played a key role, in 2019, in launching the Freemasons Neurosurgery Research Unit at CBR, which brings together clinicians from Auckland City Hospital and scientists from the University to promote neurosurgery research.

Mike worked part-time with NeuronZ and Neuren Pharmaceuticals for nine years, and he co-founded NeuroValida, a platform run through UniServices that validates drug targets for biopharmaceutical companies. From 2000 to 2008, he was involved, as part of a team, in the early stages of discovering trofinetide, which was later approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as the first effective treatment for Rett syndrome, a terrible brain disorder affecting young women.

In recent years, AI has emerged as an exciting new tool to speed up the process of developing drugs for brain disorders, says Mike. He is currently collaborating with molecular pharmacologists and AI experts in the hunt for a drug that will reduce inflammation in the brain that can be caused by substances secreted from pericytes.

“What we’re trying to do is to integrate AI with established in silico [computer-based] methods in pharmacology to speed up the discovery and development of effective and safer drugs for brain disorders and cancers.

“This work is currently aimed at brain inflammation, but ultimately the AI-driven pipeline we develop could be applied to the discovery of drugs acting on any target that we identify in a diseased human brain.

“The goal is to make them into totally new medicines, by bringing new chemistry into the area of brain inflammation and other areas.”

Mike is also trying to find drugs to regulate microglia. These brain cells usually ‘eat’ bacteria or foreign substances, but they might start to break down connections in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

For the past decade, he has also spent a considerable time researching brain cancers.

“They’re devastating things. A person is diagnosed with brain cancer and, often within a year or two, they’ve died.

“We’re looking at what’s different about microglia and pericytes in the brain of someone with a tumour and working with the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre to directly target brain cancers. They are also starting to apply in silico methods to discovering new drugs to treat brain cancers.

“The whole picture is more complicated than we will ever know, but we’ve got to start somewhere.”

When he’s not absorbed with the inner workings of the brain, Mike loves spending time with his wife, clinical psychologist and meditation teacher Sue Dykes, and their grown-up twins, software engineer Nick and teacher Lydia. A whippet called Roo and three cats complete the family circle.

Last year Mike hit the 65-year milestone, but he has no plans to retire.

“The goal is to come up with drugs to help people suffering with brain disorders and cancers and show that this patient-centred approach works,” he says.

“I’m the most excited I’ve ever been about what we’re trying to do. I’m hoping to be part of something useful to people.”

– Rose Davis