Dr. Jeff Wrana

Senior Investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital and a Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Wrana received his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1991 from the University of Toronto, and completed postdoctoral training at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has been awarded for his research excellence, including the William E. Rawls Prize from the National Cancer Institute of Canada (1998), the Premier's Research Excellence Award from the Canadian Government (1999), the Allan Bruce Robertson Young Investigator Award (2001), CIHR Investigator Award (2000), Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Research Scholar (2002-6), the Merck Frosst Prize from the Canadian Society of Biochemistry Molecular and Cell Biology (2002) and The Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (2005). In addition, Dr Wrana has been among the top hundred cited Molecular Biology scientists in the world in the past 10 years (2002-2005).

Using high-throughput proteomics and genetic tools, Dr. Wrana's research program seeks to understand the morphogen cell signaling pathways and the higher organizational structure, or network into which they are integrated, and how these systems control cell behavior in development and cancer.

For this we have developed LUMIER, a high-throughput (HTP) method to evaluate protein interactions in mammalian cells and applied it to the analysis of the TGFbeta signal transduction pathway.
Each assay measures the interaction between a luminescent, luciferase-tagged bait protein and a Flag-tagged prey, which can be captured by antibodies (yellow) immobilized on sepharose beads (black). An array scanner can be used to quantify the relative extent of interaction for large numbers of assays.