Deborah Yablonski is a preclinical faculty member at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she has headed the Immune Cell Signaling Lab, since Oct, 2000 and teaches immunology. Deborah completed her PhD at the Hebrew University in 1995, where she researched yeast signaling pathways under the supervision of Israel Prize laureate, Alexander Levitzki. Subsequently Deborah went on to complete post-doctoral studies at UCSF, where she specialized in Immune Cell Signaling pathways, under the supervision of Arthur Weiss. Research at the Immune Cell Signaling Lab is funded by leading funding agencies in Israel including the ISF and BSF and has been published in leading journals; moreover, Deborah was recently selected to become a member of the newly established Minerva Center of Cellular Intelligence.
At the Immune Cell Signaling Lab, we seek to decipher intracellular regulatory mechanisms that precisely control immune responses, specifically in T cells and mast cells. As part of this work, we identified a regulatory junction at which dimerization of an adaptor protein known as Gads is specifically required for T cell and mast cell-mediated immune responses. We are currently working to apply these insights to develop an new immunomodulatory approach, by identifying Gads dimerization inhibitors, which may have useful therapeutic properties. This research approach is described in our provisional patent application from 2018, Agents which inhibit Gads dimerization and methods of use thereof.
