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Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D.

Professor and Professor of Molecular Biotechnology and Bioengineering, and Adjunct Professor of Medicine

Dr. Hood graduated from the California Institute of Technology and received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He returned to Caltech, completing his Ph.D. in 1968. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1982, Dr. Hood has received numerous awards, including the Ricketts Medal from the University of Chicago, the 3M Life Sciences Award, and the Lasker Basic Medical Sciences Research Award. Dr. Hood joined the University of Washington in 1992 as the William Gates III Professor of Biomedical Sciences and founding chair of the Department of Molecular Biotechnology.

Projects center on molecular recognition, autoimmune disease, tolerance, and the differentiation of T cells. Two model autoimmune diseases in mice hold special interest: collagen induced arthritis and experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE). In each case attempts are being made to define the T cell repertoires responsible for the onset of these diseases. In addition, transgenic mice expressing T cell receptor genes directed against myelin basic protein and eventually collagen have been generated and are being used to study these diseases.

A major effort is also focused on large-scale mapping techniques for DNA polymorphisms that predispose to the mouse model diseases, and to human diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Powerful new semi-automated techniques for gene mapping with high-throughput (1000 samples per day) have been developed. These techniques will be applied to other human autoimmune diseases and eventually to various allergies. In addition, we are sequencing the alpha and beta T cell receptor loci from mice and humans.

Finally, we are using large-scale DNA arrays and their ability to analyze RNA expression patterns in normal lymphoid tissues, tumors, and appropriately sorted cells to study development in the human and mouse T and hematopoetic cell lineages.

Recent publications:

Orr, A.L., Hughes, T.P., Sawyers, C.L., Kato, R.M., Quan, S.G., Williams, S.P., Witte, O.N., and Hood, L. (1994). Isolation of unknown genes from human bone marrow by differential screening and single-pass cDNA sequence determination. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 91:11869-11873.

Hood, L, Rowen, L. and Koop, B.F. (1995). Human and mouse T-cell receptor loci: genomics, evolution, diversity, and serendipity. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 758:390-414.

Rowen, L. Koop, B.F. and Hood, L. (1996). The complete 685 kb DNA sequence of the human ß T cell receptor locus. Science 272:1755-1762.