Michael Fischbach

Michael Andrew Fischbach (born November 3, 1980) is an American chemist, microbiologist, and geneticist. He is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences.^[1]

Education

Fischbach earned his A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College in 2003. During that time (2000-2003), he worked in Jeffrey Settleman’s lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center on the biochemistry of oncogenic mutants of the small GTPase Ras.^[2] He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from Harvard University (2007), working in Christopher T. Walsh’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School on iron acquisition in bacterial pathogens and the biochemistry of natural product biosynthesis.^[3][4]

Career

Fischbach was a junior fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (2007-2009) before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 2009.

Fischbach is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Achaogen,^[5] the scientific advisory boards of NGM Biopharmaceuticals^[6] and Symbiota,^[7] and a co-founder of Revolution Medicines.^[8]

Research

Fischbach’s lab focuses on discovering and characterizing small molecules from microorganisms, with an emphasis on the human microbiome.^[9][10]

Small molecules from the human microbiota

In 2014, Fischbach and his laboratory published a survey of biosynthetic genes in the human microbiome, describing the ability of human-associated microbes to produce thiopeptide antibiotics.^{[11] [12][13][14]} The Fischbach lab discovered that the gut commensal Bacteroides fragilis produces the immune modulatory sphingolipid alpha-galactosylceramide,^[15] showed that the production of neurotransmitters is common among commensal gut bacteria,^[16] and discovered the biosynthetic pathway for a common class of bile acids produced by gut bacteria.^[17]

Computational approaches to natural product discovery

Fischbach’s lab developed an algorithm, ClusterFinder, that automates the process of identifying biosynthetic genes for small molecules in bacterial genome sequences.^[18][19] With Marnix Medema, he co-developed a second algorithm for identifying biosynthetic gene clusters, antiSMASH,^[20] with which ClusterFinder has been merged.

Personal life

Fischbach is married to Elizabeth Sattely, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford.

References