Scientific Highlights
Dr. Wu's lab is the first one, and as of now the only one, in the world reported functions of Eph kinases in the immune system. He has discovered that crosslinking EphB6 leads to apoptosis or activation of T cells, depending on the original state of T cells. EphB6 transduces signals into T cells using molecules it associates with. Dr. Wu�s study on the Eph function has opened a new frontier in immunobiology, and revealed previously unknown function of this largest family of receptor tyrosine kinases in the immune system. A comprehension on their function, and mechanisms of action will allow us to develop new approaches to modulate immune responses.

Research Team
Dr. Wu has trained many research students and technicians.

Postdoc.	M.Sc.	Ph.D.	Tech	Other
2	3	13	0	1

Publications

Dr. Jiangping Wu is a well-known immunologist, and has made significant contributions to transplantation immunology. He has been investigating the mechanisms of action of new immunosuppresive drugs and mechanisms of immune tolerance in the last 10 years. Dr. Wu has also pioneered in developing the proteasome inhibitors as a new category of immunosuppressants for organ transplantation.

Dr. Wu obtained his M.D. from the Zhejiang University in China in 1983 and his Ph.D. in immunology from the Department of Immunology, the University of Manitoba in 1996. Subsequently, Dr. Wu went to the University of California at San Francisco for his postdoctoral training in molecular biology. Dr. Wu took a faculty position as assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Montreal in 1989, and established the Laboratory of Transplantation Immunology in the Notre-Dame Hospital. He was promoted to associate professor in 1995, and to full professor in 2001. Since 1996, he has also been a professor (adjunct) in the Department of Surgery, McGill University.

During his training and professional career, Dr. Wu has received numerous awards including Alfred Rea Tucker Memorial scholarship from the University of Manitoba, postdoctoral fellowship from the National Kidney Foundation of U.S.A., and scholarships from Quebec Health Research Foundation (FRSQ). His research in transplantation immunology has been continuously supported in the last 10 years by national and international peer-reviewed funding agencies such as CIRH (formerly MRC), National Cancer Institute, Kidney Foundation, Heart and Stroke Foundation, Cancer Research Society, and the Roche Organ Transplantation Research Foundation (ROTRF), which is a prestigious peer-reviewed international funding agency (independent of the Roche company) and who funds about 6% of the applications from around the world in organ transplantation research. The total amount of peer-reviewed funding awarded to Dr. Wu in the last 10 years is more than 2-million dollars. Dr. Wu has also received research funding from many pharmaceutical companies such as Wyeth-Ayerst, Roche, Novartis, and Human Genome Sciences Inc.

Dr. Wu maintains vigorous research programs in several novel frontiers of immunology and transplantation. Between 1992 and 1996, Dr. Wu investigated the mechanism of action of rapamycin and published 23 papers in this area. The leading role of Dr. Wu in preclinical and clinical study of rapamycin is well recognized by the transplantation community. For this reason, Dr. Wu was an invited speaker in the Rapamycin Investigators meeting organized by Wyeth-Ayerst in Princeton, 1994.

He has raised and proven a novel hypothesis that the graft itself is the major force to maintain its survival in transplantation. This new concept raised tremendous interest in the transplantation community, and was cited by Literature Scan:Transplantation (10:4, 1994), which only quotes most influential papers in transplantation.

Dr. Wu has pioneered in the research of the role of proteasomes in immune responses. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Dr. Wu found that immune inhibition could be achieved by blocking protein degradation, and a new proteasome inhibitor DPBA could prevent graft injection without apparent toxicity in animal models. This is the first time a proteasome inhibitor is successfully used in transplantation, and Dr. Wu is in the process of bringing this finding to clinic applications. Two patents authored by Dr. Wu on this topic are pending.

Dr. Wu serves as a member of grant and scholarship committees for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Quebec Health Research Foundation for many years, and also serves as an external reviewer for the Kidney Foundation of Canada, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He has been frequently invited by many Canadian and U.S. universities as a guest speaker, and has organized and chaired symposiums of important international conferences such as the International Congress of Transplantation.