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February 01, 2007
Dr. Richard Gomer, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, and Dr. Darrell Pilling, Faculty Fellow in Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University, 2-1-07
Dr. Richard Gomer is Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University in Houston. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Pomona College and his doctorate in biology from the California Institute of Technology. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Firtel at the University of California, San Diego, Gomer began more than two decades of research using the simple eukaryote Dictyostelium as a model system to investigate the following: how a set of undifferentiated cells can break symmetry and differentiate into distinct cell types; how the cells in a group or tissue can sense what percentage of themselves are cell type 'a¹ and thus sense the composition of the tissue; and how the size of a group of cells or a tissue is sensed and maintained. Gomer joined Rice's faculty in 1988 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2000.
Dr. Darrell Pilling, an immunologist, is a Faculty Fellow in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Rheumatology at the University of Birmingham in England. In postdoctoral training at Birmingham, Pilling investigated the proteins that prevent leukocytes from dying in the joints of arthritis patients, and he helped identify peptides that could kill inflammatory cells in inflamed joints.
In 2001, while Pilling was on a traveling fellowship at Rice, Gomer and Pilling discovered that a naturally occurring protein in human blood called serum amyloid P (SAP) prevented a subset of human blood monocytes from differentiating into cells called fibrocytes. Fibrocytes participate in both wound healing and fibrotic lesions, and they play a central role in fibrotic diseases, including scleroderma, pulmonary fibrosis, renal fibrosis, cirrhosis of the liver, airway wall thickening in asthma, and cardiac fibrosis, which is associated with many, if not most, of the U.S.'s 450,000 deaths per year from heart disease. There are currently no FDA-approved therapeutics for fibrotic diseases.
In collaboration with Dr. Mark Entman at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine, Gomer and Pilling have found that SAP injections prevent ischemia/reperfusion-induced cardiac fibrosis in mice. Gomer and Pilling have applied for patents on the technology and co-founded the company Promedior, which is working to develop SAP as an anti-fibrotic therapy.
Posted by David Lemberg at February 1, 2007 12:14 PM Return to SCIENCE AND SOCIETY home page