GCOE Program Seminar(Global Education Seminar)"Systemic modeling of human disease in flies"

Dr. Penninger first generated RANKL deficient mice and showed that RANKL-RANK pathway is important not only for osteoclastogenesis but also for early differentiation of T and B cells, lymph node organogenesis, and mammary gland development (Nature, 1999; Cell, 2000). He also showed that activated T cells are directly involved in the bone loss and joint destruction by expressing RANKL on the surface (Nature, 1999). These findings have opened a novel research field so called osteoimmunology. Furthermore, he has identified roles of various genes such as Cbl-b (Nature, 2000), DREAM (Cell, 2002), AIF (Nature, 2001; Cell, 2007), PTEN (Cell, 2002; Nature, 2006), and Collectrin (Nature, 2006), in our body using gene disruption techniques. Because of these outstanding achievement, he became the director of IMBA, Austria, at the age of 38. This time, he will introduce a new approach to identify disease related genes using flies; a part of this work was published in recent Science (2009).