Bio

Dr. Ken Maclean is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and holds the Ehst-Hummel-Kaufman Family Endowed chair in Inherited Metabolic Disease. Dr Maclean gained his undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Greenwich in London, UK. This was followed by an EMBO post-doctoral fellowship at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged, Hungary and a further post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal London-St Bartholomew’s Hospital trust in the UK.

In 1998, Dr Maclean came to Colorado to work on the transcriptional and post-translational regulation of cystathionine beta-synthase (CBS) in the laboratory of Dr Jan Kraus.

Since establishing his own laboratory in 2002, Dr Maclean’s work has centered on using transgenic and knockout/in mouse models to investigate the pathobiology of CBS deficient homocystinuria (HCU), homocysteine remethylation defects, Down Syndrome, propionic acidemia and non-ketotic hyperglycinemia.

The Maclean laboratory uses transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic and behavioral approaches combined with a range of biochemical and molecular strategies to understand the biological mechanisms that result in the clinical sequelae found in these diseases with a view towards developing improved treatments. Dr Maclean recently co-directed an FDA funded multi-site clinical trial of the use of taurine as a novel treatment for HCU. This treatment resulted in significant improvement in HCU patient endothelial function and constitutes the first advance in treatment for this disease in over 50 years. Dr Maclean is currently working on four different strategies to improve clinical outcome in HCU with one of them, expected to go into clinical trials in late 2024.