David Allman, PhD

David is a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and has always strived to contribute to a reasonably wide array of topics on lymphocyte development and function. In sum, his past work has focused on very early lymphocyte development, regulation of B cell activation by oncogenes such as Bcl6, factors regulating peripheral B cell development and selection, and more recently plasma cell generation and survival. As a graduate student he was the first to describe and characterize transitional B cells, thus establishing that B cell development is not completed in the bone marrow. He has also published papers centered on the regulation of very early B cell development and commitment from multipotent precursors by IL-7 and by the transcription factor EBF1, and the development of plasmacytoid dendritic cells from lymphoid and/or myeloid precursors. Moving forward he has decided to focus to a large degree on the differentiation and survival of antibody-secreting plasma cells and approaches to deplete mature normal and malignant mouse and human plasma cells. His commitment to study human plasma cells is evidenced by new results in my lab establishing a patient derived xenograft model and our past and new data on other mouse models for myeloma and autoantibody production.