Invited Speakers

Dan Peer

Director, Laboratory of Precision NanoMedicine

Professor, Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University.

Professor, Department of Materials Sciences and Engineering, Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University.

Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel

Group Website: https://dan-peer.tau.ac.il/

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 in Tel Aviv University. Prof. Peer’s work was among the first to demonstrate systemic delivery of RNA molecules using targeted nanocarriers to the immune system and he pioneered the use of RNA interference (RNAi) as drug discovery tools in immune cells. In addition, his lab was the first to show systemic, cell specific delivery of modified mRNA in animals. This strategy has enormous implications in cancer, inflammation, and infectious diseases. His lab developed one of the largest lipid libraries with unique properties and strategies to immobilized natural ligands and antibodies on the surface of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for cell specific delivery of RNA payloads. In addition, his lab was also the first to show systemic, high efficiency, cell specific, therapeutic genome editing in cancer. Recently, his lab also showed the first bacterial mRNA vaccine that opened new potential field of increasing the arsenal of vaccines against antibiotic resistance strains. Prof. Peer has more than 145 pending and granted patents. Almost 70% of them have been licensed to several biotech and pharmaceutical companies and his innovations have now been tested in more than 10 different clinical trials. In addition, based on his lab work, four spin-off companies were generated aiming to bring innovative personalized medicine into clinical practice. Prof. Peer was the President of the Israeli Chapter of the CRS from 2014-2016. He is a scientific advisory board member in more than 15 companies and more than 20 journals. He is an associate Editor for JCR since 2013. In 2014, he was elected to the Israel Young Academy. In 2023, he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering.

Representative Publications

1.     Kon E. Kon E., Levy Y., Elia U., Cohen H., Hazan-Halevy I., Aftalion M., Ezra A., Bar-Haim E., Naidu GS, Diesendruck Y, Rotem Y., Ad-El N., Goldsmith M., Mamroud E., Peer D.*, Cohen O. A Single Dose F1-Based mRNA-LNP Vaccine Provides Protection Against the Lethal Plague Bacterium. Science Advances 2023. Mar 10;9(10):eadg1036.

2.     Chatterjee S., Naidu GS., Hazan-Halevy I., Grobe H., Ezra A. Sharma P., Goldsmith M., Ramishetti S., Sprinzak D., Zaidel-Bar R., Peer D. Therapeutic Gene Silencing of CKAP5 leads to lethality in genetically unstable cancer cells. Science Advances 2023 Apr 5;9(14):eade4800.

3.     Naidu G.S., Yong S-B, Ramishetti, S.  Rampado R., Sharma, P., Ezra A., Goldsmith M., Hazan-Halevy I., Chatterjee S., Aitha A.  Peer D. A Combinatorial Library of Lipid Nanoparticles for Cell Type-Specific mRNA Delivery. Advanced Science 2023. Apr 24:e2301929. doi: 10.1002/advs.202301929.

4.     Tarab-Ravski D., Hazan-Halevy I., Goldsmith M., Stotsky-Oterin L. , Breier D., Naidu G.S., Aitha A., Diesendruck Y., Ng B.D., Barsheshet,, H. Berger T., Vaxman J., Raanani P.,  Peer D. Delivery of Therapeutic RNA to the Bone Marrow in Multiple Myeloma using CD38-Targeted Lipid Nanoparticles. Advanced Science 2023. May 12:e2301377. doi: 10.1002/advs.202301377.

5.     Kon E., Ad-El N., Hazan-Halevy I., Stotsky-Oterin L. and Peer D. Targeting cancer with mRNA-lipid nanoparticles: key considerations and future prospects. Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, 2023 Aug 16 doi: 10.1038/s41571-023-00811-9.

6.     Chatterjee S., Kon E., Sharma P, and Peer D. Endosomal Escape: A Bottleneck for LNP Mediated Therapeutics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2024. Mar 12;121(11):e2307800120.