Mark S. Sands, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Sands has run an independent research laboratory with the goals of better understanding the underlying pathogenesis and developing effective therapies for inherited childhood diseases; specifically, lysosomal storage diseases. A major focus of his group has been to determine the safety and efficacy of enzyme replacement therapy, lentiviral-mediated hematopoietic stem cell-directed gene therapy, and adeno-associated viral gene therapy. Most recently, Dr. Sands’ group discovered that heterozygous deleterious mutations/variants in lysosomal enzyme genes are enriched in patients with Alzheimer disease.

Dr. Sands earned a B.S. in Nuclear Medicine from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1980. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990. He performed his first post-doctoral fellowship at The Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, ME) where he became interested in lysosomal storage diseases. He then performed a short post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine before joining the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in 1994.