Assistant Professor Brian Pierce Awarded $1.5 Million NIH R35 Grant

Congratulations to Brian Pierce, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Cell Biology & Molecular Genetics, for being awarded a $1.5 million R35 Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) grant from the National Institutes of Health for his project entitled “High Resolution Modeling and Design of Immune Recognition."

This five-year award will support the efforts of the Pierce Laboratory to model and design antibodies and T cell receptors, including the high-accuracy prediction of the structures of their interactions with antigenic targets. It will build upon previous advances and developments by his laboratory in this research area, including the CoV3D database that contains all known coronavirus spike and spike-antibody complex structures (http://cov3d.ibbr.umd.edu), the TCR3d database of T cell receptor structures (https://tcr3d.ibbr.umd.edu), and the TCRmodel server to model structures of T cell receptors from sequence (https://tcrmodel.ibbr.umd.edu).

Dr. Pierce’s laboratory is located in the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) in Rockville, and he is also an investigator in the University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center.