COMB Hires Comparative Immunology Expert

Baltimore, MD - Zeev Pancer D.Sc., has joined the Center of Marine Biotechnology as an Assistant Professor. The addition of Dr. Pancer and his expertise in comparative immunology complements COMB’s research interests in innate and adaptive immune systems of marine and aquatic animals.

Dr. Pancer received his doctorate in 1994 from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology for work on self/nonself recognition system in colonial tunicates. As a postdoc he studied sponges with Dr. Werner Müller in Mainz University, Germany; sea urchins with Dr. Eric Davidson at CalTech, Pasadena; and the origin of vertebrate adaptive immunity in jawless fish with Dr. Max Cooper in the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His 2004 Nature cover article described a novel type of an adaptive immune system based rearranging immune receptors in lymphocytes of jawless fish, the oldest fish on earth.

Using modern venues for immune stimulation of live sea lamprey and hagfish, sorting their blood immune cells and advanced molecular biology techniques, Dr. Pancer has discovered enormous diversity in leucine-rich repeat (LRR) proteins, consisting of varying numbers of unique sequence LRR modules. These receptors were expressed on the surface of lymphocytes and were therefore named variable lymphocyte receptors (VLR). He then found a single framework VLR gene in the lamprey genome that lacked any of the LRR diversity modules. However, in each lymphocyte a functional VLR gene is assembled by introduction of neighboring LRR cassettes from outside the gene by a mechanism of DNA rearrangement. The VLR system of jawless fish appears to function similar to our own B and T lymphocyte antigen receptors. His exciting addition to the COMB faculty provides our research team with a broader range of technical skills and knowledge to study the origin of vertebrate immunity and to explore the biotech potential of VLR as novel antibody-like receptors, and to improve the health of marine invertebrates and vertebrates in aquaculture through better understanding their immune systems.

Dr. Pancer, an internationally recognized scientist, has been invited to present his research in seminars at Berkeley, Duke, Woods Hole and Umeå in Sweden, and he is a frequent speaker at the immunology conferences of the American Association of Immunology (AAI), Antibody Engineering (IBC), Developmental and Comparative Immunology (DCI) and FASEB.

###

Celebrating our 20th anniversary year, UMBI is the first and only biotechnology research institute within the University System of Maryland and was established in 1985. The University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) consists of five major research and education centers and is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of biotechnology. UMBI’s centers of research include: CARB, the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology located in Rockville; CBR, the Center for Biosystems Research located in College Park; and COMB, the Center of Marine Biotechnology, MBC, the Medical Biotechnology Center, and IHV, the Institute of Human Virology, all located in Baltimore. For more information, visit www.umbi.umd.edu