Fraydoon Rastinejad

Biography

Fraydoon Rastinejad, Ph.D., received B.A degrees in Mathematics and in Biochemistry & Molecular Cell Biology from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in 1987. His Ph.D. in Biophysics was earned from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1992. He spent three years at Yale University training in X-ray crystallography with Professor Paul Sigler, before moving onto his first independent faculty career in 1995. Dr. Rastinejad has served as faculty at the University of Virginia School of Medicine beginning December 1995 through June 2010, where he was last appointed joint Professor of Pharmacology and Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics, and also director of the Center of Molecular Design. His current research interests, as Professor at Sanford-Burnham, involve integrating structural studies with development of small-molecule tools and cell-based characterizations of nuclear receptor pathways. In addition to the nuclear receptor arena, Dr. Rastinejad’s laboratory has elucidated a number of structures and mechanisms related to histone tail modifications and their recognition factors.

Research Interest

Our laboratory is broadly interested in ligand-regulated transcription factors and their defined roles in metabolism, cancer, inflammation, and immunity. One focus area is the nuclear receptor family. We are examining how these transcription factors bind to small molecule ligands, DNA response elements, and co-regulator proteins. Central to our work is the use of protein crystallography / X-ray diffraction to directly visualize the details of these complexes in their functional states. Our most recent work with nuclear receptors has included detailed analysis of Rev-Erbα/β (Raghuram et al. NSMB 2007), PPARγ-RXRα (Chandra et al., Nature 2008), RORγt (Huh et al., Nature, 2011), and HNF-4α (Chandra et al., Nature 2013) complexes. These studies now guide the discovery and development of new ligands with therapeutic benefit for diabetes, cancer, inflammatory diseases, and autoimmune diseases.