Meytal Landau is an Associate Professor at the Technion Faculty of Biology. Her lab focuses on the assembly of proteins into functional fibrils associated with microbial pathogenicity and infections, and their connection to neurodegenerative diseases via the gut-brain axis. The Landau lab published the first molecular structures of functional bacterial amyloid fibrils, which serve as key “weapons” making infections more aggressive. Some of these fibrils stabilize extremely strong and resistant layers of bacteria called biofilms. Others are cytotoxic to human immune cells. Thereby, they exposed new routes for the development of novel antivirulence drugs. The lab’s discovery of unique types of antibacterial human-derived and amphibian protein fibrils can facilitate the design of functional and stable nanostructures with tunable self-assembly for anti-cancer and antibacterial therapeutics with enhanced selectivity, bioavailability, and shelf-life.
Prof. Landau holds three patents and has published more than 55 papers in professional journals, cited >3300 times, and was invited to present her work at around 40 national and mostly international conferences. She has received more than 20 awards and honors, including the Daniel Shiran Memorial Prize (2020), the Hestrin Prize (2020), Juludan Research Prize (2019), the Henry Taub Prize (2019), the Biophysical Society’s Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award (2019), the Wolf Foundation’s Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research (2018), the Excellence in Research Award from the Henry Gutwirth Fund for the Promotion of Research (2018), and the Alon Fellowship from the Israeli Council for Higher Education (2013).
