Emil R. Unanue

Emil R. Unanue (born September 13, 1934) is an immunologist, and Paul and Ellen Lacy Professor of Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine. Unanue is a past recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research(1995), the Gairdner Foundation International Award(2000) and the Robert Koch Gold Medal from Germany. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He previously served as chair of the National Academy of Sciences Section of Microbiology and Immunology.

Unanue is internationally recognized as a leader in understanding how the immune system identifies foreign material, known to scientists as antigen, and how immune system T cells respond to it. His work initiated a new field of study known today as antigen presentation, a field that is critical to the development of vaccines and underlies our understanding of microbial immunity and autoimmune diseases.

In the late 1970’s, it was recognized that T cell could not recognize antigen directly and instead required the interaction of the T cell with a specialized cell known as the antigen presenting cell. Nobel Prize winners, Rolf Zinkernagel and Peter Doherty showed that this recognition also required that the antigen presenting cell be from the same genetic background as the T cell. This observation, called MHC restriction, led to the conundrum that the ability of a T cell to recognize a foreign antigen also required that it recognize self. With Paul M. Allen, the Robert L. Kroc Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine, Unanue discovered that peptides from foreign antigens were bound to a group of molecules known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) and that this peptide-MHC complex was what was being recognized by the T cell. While the hypothesis was initially greeted with intense skepticism, a large body of work, generated over the last two decades has confirmed the veracity of this hypothesis.

Emil R. Unanue received his MD from the University of Havana in 1960 and trained in Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh. He was then one of the initial postdoctoral fellows at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, now The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. With his mentor, Frank J. Dixon, he made a series of important contributions to the field of renal pathophysiology examining the immune basis of glomerulonephritis. Emil then joined the group of Brigitte Askonas at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill in London. Together, Unanue and Askonas made the seminal finding that macrophages did not completely catabolize antigens foreshadowing the development of the field of antigen processing and presentation. In 1970, he joined the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, where he quickly rose through the academic ranks, becoming the Mallinckrodt Professor of Immunopathology in 1974. While at Harvard, he and his colleagues made many key findings in the areas of immunoglobulin capping on B cells, host defense to Listeria monocytogenes, culminating in the discovery that MHC molecules display processed peptides to T cells. From 1985 - 2006, Unanue was the Chairman of Pathology and Mallinkrodt Professor at Washington University School of Medicine as well as Pathologist in Chief of Barnes-Jewish Hospital. His current research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of antigen processing, the immunological basis of autoimmune diabetes and the immune response to intracellular bacteria.

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