 | Joseph Schlessinger |
Joseph Schlessinger, professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine, will share the $1 million Dan David Prize for his research on innovative ways of treating cancer.
The Dan David Prize is a joint international enterprise endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. The prize recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. It aims to foster universal values of excellence, creativity, justice, democracy and progress, and to promote the scientific, technological and humanistic achievements that advance and improve the world.
The Dan David Prize, now in its fifth year, covers three time dimensions -- past, present and future. The "past" prize refers to fields that expand knowledge of former times. The "present" award recognizes achievements that shape and enrich society today. The "future" honor focuses on breakthroughs that hold great promise for improvement of the world.
Schlessinger, the program director of the Signal Transduction and Drug Discovery Research Program at Yale Cancer Center, was recognized in the "future" category. The other "future" award this year went to John Mendelsohn, president of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. Cellist YoYo Ma won the "past" prize and a group of four journalists shared the "present" prize.
The awards are named for Dan David, a native of Romania who made his fortune inventing, patenting, developing and marketing photographic technologies, including automatic photo booths.
"I am delighted that Yossi (Schlessinger) has won this award," said School of Medicine Dean Dr. Robert Alpern. "He has made groundbreaking findings in our understanding of how tyrosine kinases work and has translated this into the development of treatments for cancer. This translation of outstanding basic science to the bedside to help patients is exactly the paradigm American research is seeking."
Schlessinger, who holds the William H. Prusoff Professorship in Pharmacology at Yale, discovered a new code for activation of membrane receptors and for information flow from the cell surface into intracellular compartments. He also demonstrated how dysfunction in membrane receptors can cause cancer and other diseases. For the past 25 years, Schlessinger has been analyzing the mode of action of growth factor receptors and the intracellular signaling pathways that are activated in response to growth factor stimulation.
His pioneering studies provided the conceptual foundation and paved the way for discovering new families of drugs used for the treatment of many cancers and other diseases caused by dysfunctions in particular enzymes. Specifically, the research led Sugen, a company founded by Schlessinger and Axel Ullrich from Germany, to development of the drug Sutent/SU11248 for treatment of renal cancers and gastrointestinal stromal tumors, including those resistant to one of the only available medications used to treat the disease. Sutent was just approved by the FDA in January.
"I am very thrilled to receive the 2006 Dan David Prize," said Schlessinger. "We scientists are always happy when we receive recognition for our work. I am planning to donate a portion of the prize for academic activities in the Department of Pharmacology."
The awards ceremony will be held May 21 at Tel Aviv University.
T H I S
Joseph Schlessinger gets David Prize
for work on cancer treatment
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