David Housman | |
---|---|
Born | July 30, 1946 |
Alma mater | Brandeis University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Genetics, Cancer Biology |
Doctoral students | David L. Nelson James F. Gusella |
David E. Housman is an American geneticist. He is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research in the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his contribution to the discovery of the HTT gene that causes Huntington's disease.
David Housman was born on July 30, 1946. As a child he was a control in the original Salk polio vaccine trials in New York, an early experience that left him interested in how clinical trials could be more efficiently conducted. [1]
Housman received his BA in 1966 and MA in 1971 from Brandeis University. [2] As one of the first postdocs in the lab of Harvey Lodish at MIT, Housman showed that all mammalian proteins begin with a methionine residue transferred from a specific met-initiator tRNA. [3] [4] Between 1973 and 1975 he taught at the University of Toronto and was on the staff of the Ontario Cancer Institute. [5] He joined the MIT faculty in 1975. In his lab at MIT, he mentored Jim Gusella and Daniel Haber.
Housman has co-founded five biotech companies: Integrated Genetics (now part of Genzyme), Somatix Therapy Corp, Viariagenics, Kenna Technologies, and Audacity Therapeutics.
Housman's research is focused on the genetics of hereditary disease, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. His laboratory studies the WT1 gene, whose mutation causes the Wilms’ tumor in the kidneys, and is exploring it as a therapeutic target for leukemia. [6]
In 1978 Housman received a grant from the Hereditary Disease Foundation to search for the gene behind Huntington's disease using genetic markers, and embarked on this work with Jim Gusella, then a postdoc in his lab at MIT. [7] This led to the discovery of the neighborhood of the gene by Gusella's lab at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1983. [8] The Housman lab is currently investigating the modifier genes responsible for determining the age of onset for Huntington's. [6]
David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He founded the Whitehead Institute and directed it from 1982 to 1990. In 2008, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally independent entity from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where its 19 members all hold faculty appointments in the MIT Department of Biology or the MIT Department of Bioengineering. As of 2023, Ruth Lehmann is its director; she succeeded David C. Page.
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Richard M. Myers is an American geneticist and biochemist known for his work on the Human Genome Project (HGP). The National Human Genome Research Institute says the HGP “[gave] the world a resource of detailed information about the structure, organization and function of the complete set of human genes.” Myers' genome center, in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, contributed more than 10 percent of the data in the project.
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James Francis Gusella is a Canadian molecular biologist and geneticist known for his work on Huntington's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases in humans. He is the Bullard Professor of Neurogenetics in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Mass General Research Institute.
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