Mitchell Ho

Biography

Mitchell Ho is a Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), NIH. Dr. Ho and his team are designing antibodies to inhibit signaling pathways responsible for the growth of cancer. He has two main research areas. One focuses on decreasing the size of the antibody to make a 'single domain antibody' so it can target a buried functional region in receptors or signaling complexes. The second area is to establish new therapeutic targets with a focus on tumor-specific glypicans and make antibodies that modulate their activity. His group was the first to discover inhibitory antibodies with the unique ability to block Wnt/Yap signaling pathway via binding cryptic functional regions on glypican-3 in liver cancer. Dr. Ho received a Ph.D. with Mariangela Segre from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he won a NIDA/NRSA fellowship to design anti-idiotypic antibodies as cocaine antagonists. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Ira Pastan (NCI) to engineer immunotoxins against cancer. He was recruited to NCI as a tenure track Investigator in 2008 and was promoted as a tenured Senior Investigator in 2015. Dr. Ho is a recipient of the NCI Director's Intramural Innovation Award, the Meso Foundation Award, the OCRFA Individual Investigator Award and the NIH Merit Award. Dr. Ho serves on the Board of Distinguished Advisors for the Antibody Society. He is also the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry for the FAES Graduate School at the NIH.

Research Interest

1) Antibody therapeutics 2) antibody engineering 3) single domain antibodies 4) mammalian cell display 5) phage display 6) heparan sulfate proteoglycans 7) BIOC301/302 8) Biomedical Engineering and Biophysics, 9) Cancer Biology, 10) Cell Biology, 11) Immunology, 12) Molecular Biology and Biochemistry