Members' Directory

Biography: Patrick Baeuerle has served as Micromet's Chief Scientific Officer since October 1998. From February 1996 to September 1998, Patrick headed the drug discovery activities of Tularik, Inc., in South San Francisco, California, as Director, Drug Discovery. From October 1994 to February 1996, he served as a full Professor and Chairman of Biochemistry at the Medical Faculty of Freiburg University, Germany. In 1989, Patrick was awarded a group leader position at the Gene Center in Martinsried, Germany, where he did research on transcription factor NF-kappaB. According to a survey by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, Philadelphia, PA, USA), he was Germany's most frequently cited biomedical scientist of the past decade, and 38th worldwide. He has published more than 200 scientific papers, and four educational children books on biology. Patrick was appointed Honorary Professor of Immunology at the University of Munich in 2000. He performed his Ph.D. work at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Martinsried and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, obtained a Ph.D. degree in biology from the University of Munich, and performed his post-doctoral research with David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Biography: I received my PhD in 1987 (Pr. J. Duval, Rennes, France), was an EMBL and EMBO fellow of the Cell Biology Programme (Dr. W. Huttner) at the EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) from 1988 to 1991 and was research associate at the University of Heidelberg (Huttner) from 1991 to 1993. Since 1993, I am a scientist at INRA, as a group leader as from 2003.
I have studied secretory protein transport since 1984. My contributions include the characterisation of secretogranin II, a member of the granin family of proteins that are widespread markers of the regulated secretory pathway in neuroendocrine cells, from gonadotrophs (with Duval), the demonstration of the involvement of the luminal milieu of the TGN (Ca2+ and low pH) in the aggregation of the granins as the first step in their sorting (with Huttner), and identification of the disulfide-bonded loop of chromogranin B as a sorting signal to secretory granules (S. Tooze and Huttner), the first sorting domain identify for a soluble regulated secretory protein.
Since 1993, I study milk protein secretion by mammary epithelial cells. We have shown that aS1-casein, most likely by virtue of interacting with the other caseins, is required for their efficient export from the ER. Now, we wish to understand the principles that govern the elaboration and the secretory traffic of this complex, as well as of their aggregates (casein micelles). Modifications of the lipid composition of membranous sub-domains contribute to these transport events and we have demonstrated that phospholipase D and A2 cooperates in milk proteins transport and secretion. We are now interested in identifying the lipids which promote the formation of transport carriers and the various enzymes involved. Finally, we have observed (Ollivier-Bousquet) that several endocytic markers reach casein-containing secretory vesicles. Now our concern is to determine the compartment in which secretory and transcytotic proteins meet.