Samir Hanash and Laura Beretta join PHS laboratory program

Brief

Two new laboratory-based faculty members have joined the Public Health Sciences Division.

Dr. Samir (Sam) Hanash, most recently a faculty member at the University of Michigan Medical School, will spearhead a new program in Molecular Diagnostics. Hanash has been a key player in the development of methods to improve the understanding of the human proteome, the complete catalog of all human proteins. His work combines technical, biological, and informatics approaches and he is a leader in efforts to improve coordination across groups working in these areas.

Hanash is interested in identifying sets of proteins that provide important information about an individual's cancer. Such protein patterns can be used to characterize specific cancer subtypes, monitor response to treatment or for screening and early detection. He has made seminal contributions to the development of new technologies for proteomics and has discovered cancer-specific proteins for a variety of malignancies, some of which have potential to be targets for therapeutic drugs or used as the basis for diagnostic tests. He is also a founding member and served as president of the Human Proteome Organization, an effort to build a worldwide consortium dedicating to characterizing the full set of human proteins. Hanash received his medical degree from American University in Beirut, Lebanon and a Ph.D. in human genetics from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Laura Beretta, formerly associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School, studies the immune system's response to viral disease. In particular, she has studied the hepatitis C virus, an important cause of chronic liver disease and liver cancer. Beretta uses genomic and proteomic techniques to identify the genes and proteins associated with liver cancer development in order to understand why some people develop liver cancer after infection while others do not. Her lab also investigates the mechanisms of resistance to interferon, a treatment used for hepatitis C infection. Beretta is an executive committee member of the Human Proteome Initiative's Liver Proteome Project. She obtained a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular pharmacology from the University of Paris 6.

"Drs. Hanash and Beretta are excellent scientists and will bring additional lab strengths to PHS and the wider research community," said Dr. John Potter, director of the PHS Division. "We are just delighted that they have joined us."

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