David J. Glass

Biosketch

David J. Glass MD is a Vice President of Research at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and his MD from New York Medical College. He then went on to do postdoctoral work in Stephen Goff’s lab at Columbia, before joining Regeneron shortly after it was founded. He is a fellow of the AAAS and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, in addition to being a member of the NAS.

He is also very interested in helping to improve the reproducibility of the published literature. Towards that end, he authored a book titled, “Experimental Design for Biologists,” published by Cold Spring Harbor Press. He’s also taught a course by the same name for many years at Harvard Medical School, and will be teaching the same course at Columbia University’s Vagelos School of Medicine.

Dr. Glass is a co-founder of the Elsevier journal Skeletal Muscle.

Research Interests

Our scientific efforts focused initially on the discovery and characterization of novel families of growth factors as well as their receptors (e.g., neurotrophins/Trks, Tyro3/Protein S, agrin/MuSK).

The discovery of MuSK, which controls the formation of the neuromuscular junction after being activated by neuronal agrin, led to a career-long focus on skeletal muscle. We discovered the key E3 ubiquitin ligases MuRF1 and MAFbx/Atrogin1, which contribute to skeletal muscle atrophy under catabolic conditions, and further characterized the upstream signalling pathways that induce muscle catabolism.

We also helped to define the key signaling pathways that mediate skeletal muscle hypertrophy – especially the IGF1/Akt/mTORC1 pathway as being one key mechanism, and Akt inhibition of the Foxo transcription factor family as another key mechanism.

More recently we've focused on Aging to understand sarcopenia – the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and function. We're also interested in more general mechanisms of Aging which contribute to age-related disorders.

Finally, it has not escaped our notice that maintaining and improving skeletal muscle mass and function could be very helpful in settings of obesity. In the process of weight loss, it's best to maximize fat loss while maintaining skeletal muscle. Towards this goal, our group has developed antibodies to relevant extracellular receptors which serve to maintain and even increase muscle mass to help combat obesity.