Bryan L. Roth is the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Protein Therapeutics and Translational Proteomics, UNC School of Medicine.
Education
Roth earned his B.A. in biology from
Carroll College in 1977 and his M.D. and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Saint Louis University in 1983. After postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), he completed a psychiatry residency and fellowship at Stanford University in 1991. The same year, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. In 2003 he became a Professor of Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine with secondary appointments in Psychiatry, Oncology, and Neurosciences.
In 2007 he was appointed as the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Protein Therapeutics and Translational Proteomics, UNC School of Medicine.
Research
Roth has made contributions to the fields of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) pharmacology and neurobiology, particularly related to the function of
serotonin and
. His laboratory reported the structure of a serotonin receptor bound to the hallucinogenic drug,
LSD.
[Wacker D, Wang S, McCorvy JD, Betz RM, Venkatakrishnan, AJ, Levit A, Lansu K, Schools Z, Che T, Nichols DE, Shoichet BK, Dror RD, and Roth BL: Crystal structure of an LSD-bound human serotonin receptor. Cell 168: 377-389][Kim...and Roth, Cell 182: 1574-1588, 2020] Other major works include identification of new probes and tools to detect GPCRs, obtained through directed evolution in animal cells,
[English JG. Olsen, RHJ, Lansu K, Patel M, White K, Cockrell AS, Sing D, Strachan RT, Wacker D and Roth BL. VEGAS as a platform for facile directed evolution in mammalian cells. Cell 178: 748-761, 2019] developing receptors activated solely by a synthetic ligand (DREADDs), a
chemogenetic platform used to direct selective, dose-dependent activation of a specific G protein subtype in vivo.
[BN Armbruster, X Li, S Herlitzer, M Pausch and BL Roth: Evolving the lock to fit the key to create a family of GPCRs potently activated by an inert ligand. Proc Natl Acad Sci 2007 Mar 20;104(12):5163-8 (Highlighted on Cover) PMID 17350345] Thomas Insel, then Director of NIMH, stated in 2014 that DREADDs were one of the most important breakthrough technologies for the NIH
BRAIN Initiative.
[ ] and have been used by more than a thousand labs for interrogating neural circuits responsible for simple and complex behaviors in animals.
Awards and recognition
Roth’s work has been recognized by Science Signaling as one of the ‘Signaling Breakthroughs of ‘2014’
and 2016.
His DREADD technology was highlighted as one of the important advances in the past 10 years in Nature Chemical Biology.
Roth’s chemical biology discoveries have been highlighted by NIMH as one of the ‘Top 10 Research Advances of 2011’.
Roth is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).
He received the
Goodman and Gilman Award in Receptor Pharmacology from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and was a 2018
Society for Neuroscience Presidential Special Lecture.
See also
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Ultra-large-scale docking
