Receptor Engineering Lab

Rob Meijers is a structural biologist with a focus on cell surface receptors involved in neuronal development and immune recognition. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in protein X-ray crystallography studying enzyme mechanisms at atomic resolution. He did postdoctoral research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute with Jia-huai Wang and Ellis Reinherz, working on structural aspects of immune recognition.

As a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany, he established the Sample Preparation and Characterization facility for protein science, one of the largest biophysical core facilities in Europe. He developed a buffer kit to optimize the purification and storage of proteins, which is commercialized as RUBIC screens by Molecular Dimensions. He also developed a research program to study immune and neuronal receptors using mammalian expression to produce glycoproteins for structural and functional studies. He determined how the guidance cue netrin interacts with its canonical receptor deleted in colorectal cancer (DCC), and recently obtained the first peptide-free Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Class I structures which give fundamental insights into peptide binding and peptide exchange for this crucial class of adaptive immune molecules.

Currently, he is leading the Antibody Platform at IPI, to produce synthetic human IgG1 antibodies for cell surface receptors and their ligands. We are especially interested to generate antibodies for recombinantly produced fragments of cell surface receptors and their ligands, using the innovative yeast display human FAB library developed at IPI. We engage in collaborations with academic investigators that would like to use receptor engineering and synthetic antibody tools to answer fundamental questions in neurobiology and immunology.