by ROHIT
Three Biomedical Researchers Receive 2011 Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award
April 11, 2011
The Biotechnology Study Center of NYU School of Medicine will hold its 11th annual awards symposium on April 11, 2011, to honor three outstanding leaders in biomedical research. The Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Awards recognize the role of pure science in the development of pharmaceuticals and honors those scientists whose work has led to major advances to improving care provided at the patient’s bedside. Recipients of this year’s award include:"We applaud this year’s distinguished honorees for their innovative research. Epigenetics is a powerful new field of human biology and Dr. Tilghman has made perhaps its most significant discovery to date. Additionally, the research conducted by Dr. Martin and Dr. Aisen on the molecules of Alzheimer’s disease has profoundly influenced the diagnosis and treatment of this disease," said Gerald Weissmann, MD, research professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, director, Biotechnology Study Center. "The discoveries of these three remarkable scientists have already changed our approach to health and disease and they promise even more for the future."Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award in Basic Biotechnology:
Shirley M. Tilghman, PhD, FRS, Professor of Biology and President, Princeton University, for demonstrating genomic imprinting is an epigenetic process.
Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award in Applied Biotechnology:
George M. Martin, MD, Professor of Pathology Emeritus (active), Director Emeritus, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences (retired), University of Washington; Visiting Scholar, Molecular Biology Institute, UCLA, for defining molecular targets in aging and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Faculty/Alumnus Award:
Paul S. Aisen, MD, Director, Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study, Professor, Department of Neurosciences, University of California at San Diego, for translating Alzheimer’s disease research into clinical trials.
The Biotechnology Study Center is an academic center for the study of biotechnology with the end-goal of significantly improving public health. The Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Awards have been supported by a generous grant from Dart Neuroscience LLC since 2004 and are awarded on behalf of the Fellows of the Center at The Biotechnology Center.
BACKGROUND ON 2011 AWARD RECIPIENTS: Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award in Basic Biotechnology
Shirley M. Tilghman, PhD, FRS, Professor of Biology and President, Princeton University, has been a leader in the field of epigenetics, a field that studies the ways in which the expression of genes can be affected by modifications to the DNA that encode them. Before her appointment as President of Princeton University, Dr. Tilghman was Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology and Director of the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton. A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, she graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1968. After two years of secondary school teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she obtained her PhD in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the 1970's, when she was a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Philip Leder's lab at the NIH, Dr. Tilghman helped isolate one of the first mammalian genes: the beta globin gene – which she found to be interrupted by non-coding sequences – a then novel and exciting finding. Her major contribution has been the analysis of imprinting: the ways genes are chemically modified, depending on whether they are inherited from the mother or the father. These modifications lead to the parent-specific silencing of genes. For example, Dr. Tilghman and her colleagues have studied how insulin-like growth factor 2 gene, the most critical fetal growth signal, is imprinted. The copy of the gene inherited from the father is active, while that inherited from the mother is silent. Dr. Tilghman has been recognized for this work by election to the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the Royal Society of London. She also serves as a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is a member of the Board of Directors at Google.
Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award in Applied Biotechnology
George M. Martin, MD, Professor of Pathology Emeritus (active), Director Emeritus, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences (retired), University of Washington; Visiting Scholar, Molecular Biology Institute, UCLA, has deciphered the genes that cause aging and memory loss. These findings have pinpointed where drugs should work to intervene in time and memory disorders.
Dr. Martin received his BS and MD degrees from the University of Washington and has served on its faculty since 1957. After house staff training at Montreal General Hospital and the University of Chicago, he became a postdoctoral fellow of Guido Pontecorvo at Glasgow University, and has had other postdoctoral positions with Francois Gros in Paris and Henry Harris and Richard Gardner at Oxford. Dr. Martin’s research has included the positional cloning of the Werner syndrome gene followed by the demonstrations of the genomic instability and accelerated replicative senescence of Werner somatic cells. He also conducted the first cell fusion studies of dominance/recessivity relationships between old cells, young cells and "immortal" cells. In recent years, Dr. Martin has carried out a linkage analysis of familial Alzheimer disease, due to mutations in presenilin (PS). This led to the mapping of PS1&2 and the cloning of PS2. His lab synthesized the first line of transgenic mice with a knock-in of a human mutation of PS1. A conditional knockout of PS1 revealed a correlation between diminished hippocampal stem cell replication and aberrations in memory. Each of these observations has generated targets for therapeutic intervention. Dr. Martin has received the highest awards of the Gerontological Society of America, the Irving Wright Award of the American Federation for Aging Research, and a World Alzheimer Congress Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research and the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Ellison Medical Foundation.
Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Faculty/Alumnus Award
Paul S. Aisen, MD, Director, Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study, Professor, Department of Neurosciences, University of California at San Diego is the chief coordinator of United States clinical studies of Alzheimer’s disease by virtue of his translational research on inflammation in the brain. Dr. Aisen received his BA from Harvard and an MD from Columbia. After residency training at Mt. Sinai he served as a fellow in Rheumatology at NYU School of Medicine. He then returned to Mt. Sinai where he initiated groundbreaking studies on inflammation and its treatment in Alzheimer’s. His research has suggested mechanisms of inflammation in the brain that pointed to new therapeutic strategies in Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Aisen joined the faculty at Georgetown University in 1999 where he founded the Memory Disorders Program, a clinical and research program for Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. Since 2002 he has been in his present position, where recent publications reveal the basic and applied sides of his investigative reach, including Neurology and Journal of Pharmacology Experimental Therapeutics.
Media Inquiries:
Deborah (DJ) Sabalusky
212-404-3500 | deborah.sabalusky@nyumc.org
Posted in: Awards