Meytal Landau

Meytal Landau is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Biology, Technion – Israel Institue of Technology, and a Visiting Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Hamburg, Germany. Prof. Lanadu obtained her PhD in computational biochemistry, supervised by Prof. Nir Ben-Tal, from Tel-Aviv University at 2008, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, with Prof. David Eisenberg, focusing on X-ray micro crystallography of amyloid fibrils. Landau established her independent research lab at the Technion at 2012 and joined EMBL as a visiting group leader at 2019. Prof. Landau holds three patents and had published more than 55 papers in professional journals, cited >3400 times, and was invited to present her work at ~50 international conferences. She has received more than 20 awards and honors, including the Juludan Research Prize (2019), the Biophysical Society’s Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award (2019), the Wolf Foundation’s Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research (2018), and the Alon Fellowship from the Israeli Council for Higher Education (2013). The Landau lab focuses on the assembly of proteins into functional fibrils associated with microbial pathogenicity and infections, and their connection to neurodegenerative diseases. The 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.