Anne Messer, PhD, earned her BS in chemistry from Tufts University and a PhD in molecular biology from the Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Oregon. She was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Sidman, Department of Neuropathology, Harvard Medical School, where she moved into cellular and molecular studies of neurological mutants, using pre-clinical models. She held several neurological disease and genetics positions within the Wadsworth Center laboratories of the New York State Department of Health, with over 100 publications ranging from protein structure to behavioral genetics, covering multiple neurological diseases.

She is currently a principal investigator at the Neural Stem Cell Institute, Regenerative Research Foundation; and professor of biomedical sciences at the University at Albany, with a focus on novel immunotherapeutic approaches to degenerative diseases.

The Messer lab pioneered using recombinant intracellular antibody fragments, engineered and delivered as genes, to counteract pathological effects of aggregated neurodegenerative disease proteins. Her papers have demonstrated phenotypic corrections in Huntington’s disease neuronal cultures, organotypic brain slice cultures, Drosophila, and pre-clinical brains. A similar approach in Parkinson’s has resulted in publications of bifunctional anti-alpha-synuclein intrabodies/ nanobodies.