Nobel laureate Peter Agre has been selected to lead
the
Johns Hopkins Malaria
Research
Institute. Agre will take over as director at JHMRI and
join the faculty of the
Bloomberg School of
Public Health on Jan. 1. He will remain on the faculty
at Duke University and retain some of his current
responsibilities there. The announcement was made Wednesday
in New York City during the Progress
Against Malaria symposium hosted by JHMRI and the New York
Academy of Sciences.
Founded in 2001 as a state-of-the-art malaria research
facility, JHMRI has 19 full-time faculty
dedicated to the search for medical and scientific
breakthroughs in malaria prevention and treatment
by advancing basic science along every stage of the malaria
parasite life cycle. Agre will succeed Diane
E. Griffin, who has led JHMRI since it was established. She
will continue to chair the Bloomberg
School's W. Harry
Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and
Immunology.
"Peter Agre is a great scientist and a great human
being. His innovative research into the
molecular biology of malaria parasites, as well as his
ability to lead collaborations, makes him an ideal
candidate to direct the Malaria Research Institute," said
Michael J. Klag, dean of the Bloomberg
School. "He has the universal respect and admiration of
those who know him. His advocacy for human
rights fits well with the mission of the Bloomberg
School."
Agre was a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins School
of Medicine from 1981 to 2005, when
he joined Duke University Medical Center as vice chancellor
for science and technology.
In 2003, Agre shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry,
with Rockefeller University scientist
Roderick MacKinnon, for his discovery of aquaporins —
channels that regulate and facilitate water
molecule transport through cell membranes, a process
essential to all living organisms. In 2004, Agre
turned his research attention toward malaria when he was
awarded a pilot grant from JHMRI.
"Sometimes in a career, there are pathways you never
fully get to explore. A leadership position
is one way to do good things for younger scientists," Agre
said. "I hope to do this by increasing the
visibility of their work, connecting them with other
scientists around the world and reducing barriers
to their achievement of success."
Agre said that he has "always felt an interest in
diseases affecting the developing world.
Malaria is a scourge that kills more than 1 million people
each year, many of them children."
A major part of the parasite's life cycle is in red
blood cells, so Agre's background as a
hematologist and red-blood-cell membrane biochemist has the
potential to be very useful. Agre is
currently examining whether aquaporins within the
malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium could be
utilized to disrupt its life cycle.
Agre will remain a professor of cell biology and
medicine and a senior adviser to the chancellor
for health affairs at Duke, where he will maintain a
laboratory and continue some of his current
duties. He also will lead development of a consortium of
malaria researchers at JHMRI and Duke and
in the Triangle region of North Carolina.
Born in Northfield, Minn., in 1949, Agre went to
Theodore Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis
and in 1970 earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from
Augsburg College in that city. He received
his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine in 1974, and after postgraduate
medical training and a fellowship at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Agre returned in
1981 to Johns Hopkins, where he progressed through the
ranks of the departments of Medicine and
Cell Biology. In 1993, he became a professor in the
Department of Biological Chemistry.
Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy
of Sciences in 2000 and in the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He holds two
U.S. patents on the isolation, cloning
and expression of aquaporins 1 and 5 and is the principal
investigator on four current National
Institutes of Health grants.
For more about the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research
Institute, go to
malaria.jhsph.edu.
GO TO