Dan Peer is a Professor and the Director of the Laboratory of Precision NanoMedicine at Tel Aviv University (TAU). He is also the Vice President for Research and Development at TAU. In 2017 he co-founded and acts as the managing director of SPARK Tel Aviv, Center for Translational Medicine. From 2016–2020 he was the chair of the TAU Cancer Biology Research Center.[1]
Peer is a scientific advisory board member in more than 15 companies and on the scientific advisory board of 20 journals. He is a past President of the Israeli Chapter of the Controlled Release Society.[2] In 2014 he was elected to the Israel Young Academy of Science.[3] He is a Fellow, National Academy of Inventors (USA) and an International Member of the National Academy of Engineering (USA).
Research work
Prof. Peer pioneered the field of active cellular targeting of RNA payloads into specific cell types. His lab was among the first to demonstrate immunomodulation through a systemic delivery of RNA-loaded targeted nanocarriers. The team also pioneered the use of RNAi to reprogram immune cells and discover new therapeutic modalities.[4] In addition, his lab was the first to show systemic, cell specific delivery of mRNA in an animal. Through this approach they have induced therapeutic gene expression of desired proteins (including novel approaches for cell specific, high efficiency therapeutic genome editing), which has implications in cancer, rare genetic diseases and infectious diseases.[5][6]
Recently, the Peer lab was the first to develop a bacterial mRNA vaccine, which could provide a fast response against an aggressive bacterial infection and antibiotic resistant strains. Furthermore, the team is developing novel therapeutic strategies to treat different types of cancers using novel drug targets that they identify, cancer vaccines or by using bacterial toxins in the form of mRNA to kill tumor cells. [7]
On top of this, the Peer lab generated a very large lipid library with unique features. Some of these lipids have been licensed to several major pharmaceutical companies and are now under clinical development as carriers for siRNA, mRNA, and circRNA for different indications including cancer, infectious diseases, rare genetic diseases and inflammation. [8][9][10]
