About Us » FFB Funded Researchers
John G. Flannery, Ph.D.
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John G. Flannery, Ph.D. is Professor of Vision Science and Molecular and Cell Biology, and is the Associate Director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked on the structure and function of the photoreceptors and RPE of the retina continuously since he was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the laboratory of Steven Fisher, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1982. He received postdoctoral training at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA in retinal cell biology with Professor Dean Bok, where he examined the retinoid processing of the RPE and the histopathology of retinitis pigmentosa in a human donor eye. He completed a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Jules Stein Eye Institute under the supervision of Professor Debora Farber, where he collaborated with Janis Lem and Melvin Simon on the transgenic rescue of the rd-1 mouse model of recessive RP. In 1990, he started the first translational retina research laboratory in the Doris Stein Research laboratories at UCLA in collaboration with Dr. Hilel Lewis. In 1991, Dr. Flannery accepted an assistant professorship in Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at the University of Florida. At UF, Bill Hauswirth and he wrote one of the NIH first grants to apply AAV gene therapy in the retina and collaborated on some of the initial studies using AAV viral vectors to transfer gene constructs to the retina. In 1995, he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley in his current departments. In 2004, he joined the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley and became the Associate Director of the Institute. Dr. Flannery’s research interests are developing genetic and small molecule therapies for inherited retinal degenerations, and creating relevant small animal models for these conditions. He is specifically interested in developing rodent models of RP and Usher syndrome to create therapies for these conditions. Recently he began collaborating on a NIH Nanomedicine Initiative in Optical Control of Biological Function. He and his colleagues are focusing on ion channels, G-protein coupled receptors, kinases and phosphatases as biological and disease targets. These proteins are implicated as causes and drug targets in major human diseases. They are designing ‘toolkits’ of light-gated signaling proteins and of light-gated peptides that selectively modify protein function. They are using structure-based design to chemically synthesize two classes of nanoscale photoswitches: 1) ligand photoswitches that attach to native and engineered target proteins, and remote control their function (with both activating and blocking ligands); and 2) light-gated peptides, which bind to target proteins (at interaction domains or substrates binding sites) in a light-dependent manner, interfering with function only in the bound state. A critical challenge is to transfer their methods from basic research in cell biology to therapeutics for eye disease. They are focusing on animal models of human disease, including using light-gated channels to restore vision to retina that have lost photoreceptor cells, treatment of retinal disease due to angiogenesis, and prevention of retinal damage due to ischemia. |
