Theodore Friedmann

director, Gene Therapy, UCSD

Theodore Friedmann, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, is also director of the Program in Gene Therapy there. The overriding interest of his laboratory is gene therapy. He and his team continue their interest in the assembly and in vivo targeting of viral vectors and non-viral nanoparticle vectors. They apply these gene transfer methods as well as microarray-based transcriptional profiling and proteomic techniques to the study of a neuro-degenerative and developmental CNS disorder, and also use microarray and proteomic methods to characterize the developmental pathways in human embryonic stem cells that produce classes of neurons, especially dopaminergic neurons. Friedmann's laboratory is also using transcriptional and proteomic techniques to examine the mechanisms of action of muscle growth factors and anabolic steroids, both in vitro and in vivo.