2021 Arizona Distinguished Lecture

We are delighted to announce that the Arizona Distinguished Lecture for the 2021 Arizona Physiological Society Annual Meeting will be given by Dr. Stephen H. Wright, Professor in the Department of Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona. The title of Dr. Wright’s lecture: “Maintaining a Positive Outlook: Mechanisms of Organic Cation Transport.”

The broad selectivity of the renal transport proteins, OCT2 and MATE1, allows them to work in concert to actively secrete many organic cations, including about 40% of prescribed drugs. However, that broad selectivity also makes these processes targets for unwanted drug-drug interactions, some of which result in marked changes in the pharmacokinetics of clearance of co-administered compounds. Dr. Wright will discuss the current understanding of mechanisms of interaction of substrates and inhibitors with these transporters.

Dr. Wright received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in Marine Biology at the University of California, Irvine. After pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ernest Wright in the Department of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona in 1982 and has been Professor of Physiology since 1992 (and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics since 2004).  His research focuses on mechanisms of organic electrolyte transport, primarily in the mammalian kidney. The emphasis in recent years has been on the kinetics, energetics, and selectivity of organic cation transporters, particularly OCT2 and MATE1.