Dean L. Mann, M.D. is Professor in the Department of Pathology and Head of the Division of Immunogenetics. He is a member of the Program in Oncology and Director of the Greenebaum Cancer Center Flow Cytometry Core Facility. He is also the Associate Director of the National Red Cross Histocompatibility Testing Laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine. Dr. Mann received his medical degree from St. Louis University, School of Medicine, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at this University’s group of hospitals. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the Immunology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, NIH. After completion of the fellowship, he served for 28 years as Principal Investigator and Section Head in several NCI Branches and Laboratories. Since leaving the NIH, Dr. Mann has been a permanent member of the HIV Vaccine Study Section since 1997. Dr. Mann accepted a position at the University of Maryland some 8 years ago where he continues his research in immunogenetics and immunology.

Dr. Mann has authored/co-authored over 230 peer-reviewed publications and 46 invited manuscripts and book chapters. The peer-reviewed articles are published in first line journals, including Science, Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Immunology, and the Journal of Biologic Chemistry. Dr. Mann is nationally and internationally known for his work in the field of the identification, characterization, of the genes and gene products in the major histocompatibility complex. He and his colleagues were the first to successfully obtain soluble HLA Class I molecules, which resulted in their characterizations for structure, size, and amino acid sequence. A major result of these studies was the crystallization of these products and the demonstration that MHC molecules contained peptide sequences. These results are the foundation for our concepts in antigen presentation and genetic restriction of the polymorphisms of MHC genes in relationship to immunologic response. Other contributions include the demonstration that certain MHC alleles were preferentially associated with higher frequency at certain diseases most notably autoimmune diseases and in HIV. The latter demonstrating that specific HLA alleles or combinations of HLA alleles were associated with long-term non-progression in HIV infected individuals. Selection of these published reports is in the appended bibliography. Since coming to the University of Maryland, Dr. Mann has focused his research in the areas of dendritic cell biology with the emphasis on translation into applications of vaccines. This application includes the use of dendritic cells as a vehicle for the delivery of cancer vaccines, to use dendritic cells to discover components of products of prostate cancer that may be used for immunotherapy and the use of plant virus-like particles for the delivery of component vaccines for infectious disease including agents that are considered threats for bioterrorism.