Dedee F Murrell
Professor Murrell is Head of the Department of Dermatology at St George Hospital, University of New South Wales, in Sydney. She graduated with honours in Medicine from the University of Cambridge (pre-clinical) and Oxford (clinical medicine), and subsequently completed general medical training at Oxford, Cambridge and Duke Universitites, followed by the dermatology residency training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and faculty positions at the New York University and Rockefeller Universities in New York, prior to Sydney, where she set up a centre for diagnosis and management of EB. She specialises in novel therapeutics for skin disorders. Prof Murrell has specialist qualifications in dermatology in the USA, the UK and Australia.
Her research has focused on the pathogenesis of blistering disorders. She characterized the epitopes in collagen VII involved in epidermolysis bullosa acquisita, the properties of plakophilin 1 in desmosomes and adherens junctions, prior to it being known to be involved in epidermolysis bullosa. She has described novel genotype to phenotype correlations in epidermolysis bullosa simplex, junctional EB and dystrophic EB. Her team has conducted evidence-based Cochrane reviews on interventions for pemphigus, bullous pemphigoid and EBA, and developed and validated novel outcome measures for epidermolysis bullosa, pemphigus and pemphigoid. Her team established the first orphan Australasian orphan disease registry, for EB, characterizing the epidemiology of EB and its complications in Australia, and completed the first randomized controlled trial for allogeneic fibroblast cell therapy in EB. Her research has been supported by the Howard Hughes Foundation, NIH, N-RISS and NHMRC.
She has 140 publications in peer reviewed journals, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, the Cochrane Skin Group and is a reviewer for multiple scientific journals. She edited four issues of Dermatologic Clinics devoted to Epidermolysis Bullosa and Autoimmune Blistering Diseases. She is an ASDR Board Member, was the Convenor of the ASDR meeting held in Sydney in 2012 with the AWTRS, and a Patron member of the SID and ESDR. She is Executive Vice President of the International Society of Dermatology, a Board member of the Women’s Dermatologic Society and Chair of the American Academy of Dermatology’s World Congress Task Force. She is a founding Medical Advisory Board of the International Pemphigus & Pemphigoid Foundation and President of the Australasian Blistering Diseases Foundation.
Abstracts this author is presenting: