Ellen Heber-Katz


Ellen Heber-Katz is an American immunologist/regeneration biologist who is professor at Lankenau Institute for Medical Research. She is an immunologist who investigates mammalian regeneration, having discovered the ability of the MRL mouse strain to regenerate wounds without scarring and to fully restore damaged tissues. Her work on regeneration has been extended into National Cancer Institute -funded studies of novel aspects of breast cancer causation. Her research interests include immunology, regenerative medicine and cancer.

Education and career

Heber-Katz earned her B.A. in microbiology and immunology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1969, and her M.S. in immunology from the same university in 1972. For her M.S. thesis, she studied the role of reducing agents as a critical factor in cellular immune responses. She then moved to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded her Ph.D. in immunology in 1976. For her doctoral thesis she demonstrated that single T-cell subsets could respond to both histocompatibility antigens and environmental antigens, establishing the unity of these two branches of the immune response.
She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the Laboratory of Immunology, discovering the first functional evidence for the T cell–antigen-MHC-Ia tri-molecular complex anticipating the crystal structure.
With the use of genetically inbred mice, Heber-Katz and collaborators dissected the fine molecular details that control the T-cell and macrophage interaction. This "A/5R experiment" confirmed the Determinant Selection Hypothesis concerning the spatial relationships between the histocompatibility I-A and I-E molecules on the surface of antigen- presenting cells, the bound antigen and the recognition structure of the T-cell receptor.