Wendell Lim | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Bioengineering |
Institutions | University of California, San Francisco |
Academic advisors | Fred Richards [1] |
Wendell Lim is an American biochemist who is the Byer's Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. [2] He is the director of the UCSF Cell Design Institute. [3] He earned his A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University working with Jeremy Knowles on enzyme evolutionary optimization. He obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Bob Sauer using genetic and biophysical approaches to understand the role of hydrophobic core interactions in protein folding. [4] He then did his postdoctoral work with Frederic Richards at Yale University on the structure of protein interaction domains. [5] [6] Lim's work has focused on cell signaling, synthetic biology, and cell engineering, particularly in immune cells. [7]
Lim's research has focused on mechanisms of cell signaling – how cells sense their environment and process this information to make complex functional decisions. [6] He began his career studying the structure and function of modular signaling domains and scaffold proteins, but became increasingly interested in the general question of how modularity plays a role in the evolution of new signaling circuits and networks. [6]
Lim has been a pioneer in the fields of synthetic and systems biology, asking how rewiring cellular regulatory circuits can be used to understand fundamental design principles of biological systems. He showed that signaling proteins and pathways could be functionally rewired in living cells using altered protein interaction domains, scaffold proteins, and modular allosteric interactions. [8] [9] [10] [11] He helped pioneer the use of optogenetic response modules as a way to exert control of intracellular signaling and its use in profiling how cells respond to temporal patterns of stimulation. [12] [13] [14] He has also worked on identifying common regulatory network modules that perform fundamental cellular functions such as amplification, adaptation, spatial self-organization, polarized cell movement, and temporal sensing. [15] [16] [17] [18] He has been applying these approaches to engineer and understand immune cell function as well as multicellular self-organization (synthetic development). [18] [19]
Lim has been a leader in the application of synthetic biology approaches to immune cell engineering and cell therapy development, advocating approaches for predictively engineering cells with precision therapeutic functions to treat cancer and other complex diseases. [20] [21] His group was the first to develop small molecule gated chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) [22] as well as the highly flexible synthetic Notch (synNotch) receptor platform for programming novel transcriptional control circuits. [23] [24] [25] His group has shown how these components can be used to design T cell circuits that achieve precision combinatorial antigen detection and killing of cancer (synNotch to CAR circuits). [24] [26] [27] His group has also engineered T cells to recognize specific target tissues, and to deliver genetically encoded therapeutic payloads to these sites. [25] In addition, Lim's group has used these synthetic receptors to design positive feedback circuits for sensing antigen density with non-linear thresholds. [28]
Lim was part of the team that invented the CRISPRi system that used modular DNA targeting of inactive Cas9 to control the transcription of specific endogenous genes. [29] He has also been engineering multicellular networks that drive specific formation of complex self-organizing tissue-like structures. [18] Lim and colleagues have advocated applying cell engineering approaches to many other complex diseases besides cancer, as well as using engineered cells as research tools for probing and perturbing cell and tissue regulatory networks. [28]
Lim's work in immune cell engineering led to the founding of the early cell therapy engineering company Cell Design Labs in 2015, which was acquired by Gilead Sciences in 2017. [30]
Lim co-authored the textbook Cell Signaling with colleagues Bruce Mayer and Tony Pawson. [31] His group has also participated in the synthetic biology outreach program iGEM with San Francisco Bay Area high school students and teachers. [32] [33] He has also conducted creative projects on design thinking, [34] as well as science and cooking. [35]
Lim is Chinese-American and grew up in Chicago, where he graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. [36] He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and children. Lim is an avid basketball player, surfer, and artist. [6]
COPI is a coatomer, a protein complex that coats vesicles transporting proteins from the cis end of the Golgi complex back to the rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER), where they were originally synthesized, and between Golgi compartments. This type of transport is retrograde transport, in contrast to the anterograde transport associated with the COPII protein. The name "COPI" refers to the specific coat protein complex that initiates the budding process on the cis-Golgi membrane. The coat consists of large protein subcomplexes that are made of seven different protein subunits, namely α, β, β', γ, δ, ε and ζ.
Timothy John Mitchison is a cell biologist and systems biologist and Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the United States. He is known for his discovery, with Marc Kirschner, of dynamic instability in microtubules, for studies of the mechanism of cell division, and for contributions to chemical biology.
A receptor activated solely by a synthetic ligand (RASSL) or designer receptor exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADD), is a class of artificially engineered protein receptors used in the field of chemogenetics which are selectively activated by certain ligands. They are used in biomedical research, in particular in neuroscience to manipulate the activity of neurons.
Stephen James Benkovic is an American chemist known for his contributions to the field of enzymology. He holds the Evan Pugh University Professorship and Eberly Chair in Chemistry at The Pennsylvania State University. He has developed boron compounds that are active pharmacophores against a variety of diseases. Benkovic has concentrated on the assembly and kinetic attributes of the enzymatic machinery that performs DNA replication, DNA repair, and purine biosynthesis.
Susan L. Ackerman is an American neuroscientist and geneticist. Her work has highlighted some of the genetic and biochemical factors that are involved in the development of the central nervous system and age-related neurodegeneration. Her research is aimed at helping scientists understand what causes several types of neurodegeneration in mammals. This research, and others' like it, may lead to cures for neurodegenerative diseases. Ackerman is a professor at University of California San Diego. She was formerly a professor at the Jackson Laboratory and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University. She also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Maine, Orono. Ackerman was an associate geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
iCLIP is a variant of the original CLIP method used for identifying protein-RNA interactions, which uses UV light to covalently bind proteins and RNA molecules to identify RNA binding sites of proteins. This crosslinking step has generally less background than standard RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) protocols, because the covalent bond formed by UV light allows RNA to be fragmented, followed by stringent purification, and this also enables CLIP to identify the positions of protein-RNA interactions. As with all CLIP methods, iCLIP allows for a very stringent purification of the linked protein-RNA complexes by stringent washing during immunoprecipitation followed by SDS-PAGE and transfer to nitrocellulose. The labelled protein-RNA complexes are then visualised for quality control, excised from nitrocellulose, and treated with proteinase to release the RNA, leaving only a few amino acids at the crosslink site of the RNA.
Dana Pe'er, Chair and Professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute is a researcher in computational systems biology. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator since 2021, she was previously a professor at Columbia Department of Biological Sciences. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer.
Hilmar Bading is a German physician and neuroscientist. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina.
Extrasynaptic NMDA receptors are glutamate-gated neurotransmitter receptors that are localized to non-synaptic sites on the neuronal cell surface. In contrast to synaptic NMDA receptors that promote acquired neuroprotection and synaptic plasticity, extrasynaptic NMDA receptors are coupled to activation of death-signaling pathways. Extrasynaptic NMDA receptors are responsible for initiating excitotoxicity and have been implicated in the etiology of neurodegenerative diseases, including stroke, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
K. Christopher Garcia is an American scientist known for his research on the molecular and structural biology of cell surface receptors. Garcia is a professor in the Departments of Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Structural Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine. In addition to his role at Stanford, Garcia is a co-founder of several biotechnology companies, including Alexo Therapeutics, Surrozen, and 3T Biosciences.
Jeannie T. Lee is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is known for her work on X-chromosome inactivation and for discovering the functions of a new class of epigenetic regulators known as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), including Xist and Tsix.
Andrew P. Carter is a British structural biologist who works at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. He is known for his work on the microtubule motor dynein.
Jean-Pierre Kinet is a French-American immunologist known for his work studying the role of calcium signaling in the immune response. He is a professor in the Department of Pathology and an Immunology Faculty Member in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School.
Yi Zhang is a Chinese-American biochemist who specializes in the fields of epigenetics, chromatin, and developmental reprogramming. He is a Fred Rosen Professor of Pediatrics and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, a senior investigator of Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also an associate member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, as well as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is best known for his discovery of several classes of epigenetic enzymes and the identification of epigenetic barriers of SCNT cloning.
Samara Reck-Peterson is an American cell biologist and biophysicist. She is a Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, San Diego and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her contributions to our understanding of how dynein, an exceptionally large motor protein that moves many intracellular cargos, works and is regulated. She developed one of the first systems to produce recombinant dynein and discovered that, unlike other cytoskeletal motors, dynein can take a wide variety of step sizes, forward and back and even sideways. She lives in San Diego, California.
Anne Bertolotti is a French biochemist and cell biologist who works as Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. In 2022 she was appointed Head of the MRC LMB's Neurobiology Division. She is known for her research into the cellular defences against misfolded proteins and the mechanisms underlying their deposition, the molecular problem causative of neurodegenerative diseases.
Hana El-Samad is a Lebanese-American scientist who is a founding Principal Investigator at Altos Labs and a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work considers control theory and the function of complex biological systems. Her group has made contributions to systems biology, synthetic biology, and cell engineering.
Keith E. Mostov is an American cell biologist. He received a BA from University of Chicago in 1976 and during 1976–77 he was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford. Mostov received a PhD in Biological Science from the Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Günter Blobel in 1983, and an MD from Weill Cornell Medicine in 1984. He was a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute of MIT from 1984 to 1989. In 1989, Mostov joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, where he is currently Professor. Mostov and colleagues discovered and sequenced the Polymeric Immunoglobulin Receptor (pIgR) and proposed the generally accepted model of its pathway and function. Neil E. Simister and Mostov cloned and sequenced the Neonatal Fc Receptor (FcRn). Mostov and colleagues showed how signals in the pIgR direct its polarized trafficking and how polarized MDCK epithelial cells form three-dimensional structures with lumens and tubules. Mostov and colleagues further found how simple rules cause different branching patterns in kidney as compared to other branching tubular organs
James Allen Wells is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his B.A. degrees in biochemistry and psychology from University of California, Berkeley in 1973 and a PhD in biochemistry from Washington State University with Ralph Yount, PhD in 1979. He completed his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University School of Medicine with George Stark in 1982. He is a pioneer in protein engineering, phage display, fragment-based lead discovery, cellular apoptosis, and the cell surface proteome.
Jonathan C. Kagan is an American immunologist and the Marian R. Neutra, Ph.D. Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He is also the director of Basic Research and Shwachman Chair in Gastroenterology at Boston Children's Hospital. Kagan is a world leader in defining the molecular basis of innate immunity and inflammation.