November 13, 2002
Association of American Medical Colleges honors Dana-Farber researcher
Stanley Korsmeyer, MD
Stanley J. Korsmeyer, MD, a senior researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has been named the winner of the Association of American Medical Colleges' 2002 Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences. The honor was presented during a ceremony on Nov. 9 at the AAMC's 113th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Calif.
Korsmeyer is widely recognized for his research into the mechanisms that regulate apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Korsmeyer isolated a novel cancer-causing gene called Bcl-2 that prevents cells from dying on schedule according to the protective mechanism of apoptosis. This abnormal survival of cells is at the root of follicular lymphoma and other cancers in humans. These experiments established Bcl-2 as the archetype of a new category of oncogenes (cancer-causing genes) that are regulators of cell death.
The Korsmeyer lab is continuing to study the role of programmed cell death regulatory genes in development of cancer. Korsmeyer and his colleagues have discovered a series of death promoting BCL-2 family members. He established the paradigm that a ratio of pro- to anti-apoptotic molecules determines the susceptibility to apoptosis.
"I am delighted to be recognized by the AAMC, to whom we owe so much for their leadership in medical education," said Korsmeyer, who is the director of Dana-Farber's Program in Molecular Oncology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
AAMC established the distinguished research award in 1981 to recognize medical school faculty members who conduct outstanding clinical or laboratory research. The Baxter Allegiance Foundation funds the award.
Korsmeyer, who also is the Sidney Farber Professor of Pathology and a professor of medicine at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School, earned his medical degree at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He continued on to postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco and the National Institutes of Health. After working at the National Cancer Institute and the Washington University School of Medicine, Korsmeyer joined Dana-Farber in 1998.
The Association of American Medical Colleges represents the 125 accredited U.S. medical schools; the 16 accredited Canadian medical schools; some 400 major teaching hospitals, including Veterans Administration medical centers; more than 105,000 faculty in 98 academic and scientific societies; and the nation's 66,000 medical students and 97,000 residents.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, a federally designated Center for AIDS Research, and a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a federally designated comprehensive cancer center.
