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Dr David Bulmer

Dr David Bulmer

BSc PhD

  • Position Bye Fellow
  • School Biological Sciences Department of Pharmacology
  • Email dcb53@cam.ac.uk
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David Bulmer is a pharmacologist and neuroscientist with a longstanding interest in Gastrointestinal Pharmacology. David's research is focused on understanding the causes of pain in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and the development of novel treatments.

Dr David Bulmer

David Bulmer has a BSc in pharmacology from the University of Manchester and a PhD in autonomic neuroscience from University College London. He is an Associate Professor and Part II Course Organiser in the Department of Pharmacology. David is also a Visiting Lecturer in Neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
David has nearly 20 years experience researching in gastrointestinal pharmacology within both academia and industry, working to develop new drug treatments for IBS and IBD at GlaxoSmithKline before leaving on an MRC Skills Gap Fellowship to establish his own translation neuroscience lab focused on the use of human tissue to study visceral pain at QMUL. David left QMUL in 2017 to join the Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge.
David continues to enjoy strong links with industry, having research collaborations with Astra Zeneca, Sosei-Heptares and GlaxoSmithKline looking at novel pain treatments, and funding from leading charities such as Crohn's and Colitis UK, devoted to improving the lives of people with IBD.

David's research interest are the mediators and mechanisms which give rise to pain by activating visceral nociceptors in IBD and IBS patients. To do this he uses a combination of electrophysiological, imaging and sequencing approaches alongside tissue samples from well phenotyped patient cohorts to identify how different mediators stimulate pain-sensing nerves in differ disease states.
Most recently David was part of a consortium of researchers awarded funding from the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation to investigate the causes of chronic pain in IBD patients in remission.

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