Mitch Magee

D. Mitchell Magee joined the Virginia G Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics as part of a team of scientists and engineers to assist with discovery of high throughput methods for analysis of protein-protein interaction and biomarker discovery.  He attended the University of Texas Medical Branch and obtained a B.S. in Medical Technology.  After several years’ experience in clinical and research laboratories, he matriculated to Texas A&M University and obtained a Ph.D. in Microbiology.  His post-doctoral fellowship was performed at the University of Pittsburgh.  He has been working extensively in interdisciplinary teams for high-throughput sample handling and analysis efforts.  He has more than 25 years’ experience in studying Coccidioides immunobiology including growth and extraction of fungal extracts, recombinant cloning of immunodominant antigens and evaluating the protective immune response in animal models of coccidioidomycosis.  He helped initiate one of laboratories as part of the CDC’s National Tuberculosis Genotyping and Surveillance Network in which we performed RFLP typing of clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  Here we catalogued information on over 5,000 clinical tuberculosis isolates and established and validated DNA extraction and DNA fingerprinting analyses protocols.  Additional experience with high throughput functional studies occurred in several projects of vaccine candidate discovery in models of coccidioidomycosis, smallpox, and glanders.  These studies combined efforts of bioinformatics, molecular biologists and biologists to identify immunodominant proteins functionally through their protective effects against microbial challenge.  Most recently, he has utilized protein microarrays to probe the immune response of patients or animal models of disease to identify immunodominant proteins in patients or animals during disease progression.   These large-scale studies of gene expression, peptide and protein microarrays, provide a firm foundation for high throughput studies with an emphasis on developing and refining sample preparation and analysis protocols.