Maximiliano Javier Jiménez-DalmaroniTeacher-Assistant ( Biochemistry and Molecular Biology)& Visiting Scientist,Faculty of Medicine,The National University of La Plata, La Plata, Argentina
Biography
Maximiliano Javier Jiménez Dalmaroni is currently a Visiting Scientist at the Faculty of Medicine, The University of La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. He received a B.Sc. in Chemistry (UNLP) in 1998, and a M.Sc. in Biochemistry (UNLP) in 2000. He received his D.Phil. in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 2008. From 2000 to 2001 he did a post-graduate research in the development of adenoviral vectors for gene therapy in the Department of Medicine, The University of Manchester (UK) and from 2001 to 2003 and Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles (USA). He did a postdoctoral research in Cincinnati Children?s Hospital from 2003 to 2009 in the role of novel cadherins in cell adhesion which has important roles in the development and diseases.
His research interests center on understanding the role of innate immunity in microbial infections and chronic inflammatory diseases. During his post-graduate research at Manchester University (UK) and later at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and the Department of Medicine and Pharmacology, University of California Los Angeles (USA), he design and engineered from scratch novel helper-dependent adenovirus vectors (Hd-AV), employing human non-coding DNA sequences and devoided of any viral DNA coding sequences to minimize the possibility of eliciting an immune response against the Hd-AV. These adenoviral vectors showed a long and sustained gene expressed for at least one year in pre-immunized animals with adenovirus vectors, which are highly desired features for viral vectors for human gene therapy clinical trials. This work had a profound impact on his research interests and he became fascinated on the mechanisms that lead to the activation of innate immunity. By that time, he was granted a highly prestigious Oxford/Scripps scholarship to pursue my D.Phil. studies at The Department of Biochemistry at Oxford University (UK) and at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) (USA). During that time, his research was focused on one of the most important family of innate immunity receptors, which is the toll-like receptors (TLRs).These receptors are key proteins involved in early recognition and induction of an immune response against microbial pathogens. H demonstrated that human TLR2 can directly bind different kind of molecules from gram positive bacteria to mycobacteria, as well as mycoplasma. During his D.Phil., he established an independent collaboration with Prof Bruce Beutler, Nobel Prize of Medicine 2011, at TSRI to investigate the role of the TLR2 co-receptors CD36 and CD14 in the modulation of TLR2 signaling pathway. His work established a hierarchy among these co-receptors and it uncovered novel properties of CD36 in terms of its interaction with TLR2. Finally, his discovery that increased levels of CD36 could potentiate the pro-inflammatory response of TLR2, have profound implications for the prognosis and progression of chronic inflammatory diseases such as diabetes and atherosclerosis. After finishing his DPhil, he did a postdoctoral research at the Cincinnati Children?s Hospital (USA) where he investigated the role in cell adhesion and development of a novel cadherin which is involved in asthma, allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, with the aim of develop an animal model for studying the role of this novel cadherin in the pathogenesis of chronic inflammatory diseases.
Research Interest
His research interests center on understanding the role of innate immunity in microbial infections and chronic inflammatory diseases.