Dean Sheppard

Dean Sheppard is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF. His lab studies the in vivo biology of integrins and the roles that heterogeneous populations of fibroblasts play in lung development, health and disease. His lab initially cloned the genes encoding several integrin subunits and generated a wide array of global and conditional integrin subunit knockout mice and used these mice to describe the phenomenon of integrin-mediated activation of latent TGFbeta. His lab and have studied the roles of integrins and TGFbeta in multiple aspects of in vivo biology. HIs work has led to the development of 5 new drugs that are in various stages of pre-clinical or clinical development. His lab have used single cell RNA sequencing to identify multiple populations of fibroblasts with distinct anatomic locations in normal lungs and additional populations that emerge in response to fibrotic tissue injury and shown that these populations are present in both murine and human lungs. They have generated several genetic tools that allow tracking, genetic manipulation or deletion of many of these fibroblast subsets. He is an elected member of the American Association of Arts and Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.