This week, the Lasker Foundation announced its awards for basic and clinical biomedical research. The Lasker awards are considered one of the most prestigious awards in medicine – the American Nobels. The Nobel Prize for Medicine will be announced next week.
The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award is shared by John Gurdon of Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University. Both researchers have discovered ways in which specialized adult cells can be reprogrammed at the nuclear level to become stem cells.
Although much work remains to determine whether nuclear reprogramming techniques will prove safe and effective enough for clinical use, Gurdon's and Yamanaka's discoveries have opened potential avenues toward personalized cell-replacement therapies. Such treatments might offer a means to restore malfunctioning or worn out tissues without subjecting a patient to the risks of immune rejection. Reprogrammed cells also afford novel approaches toward understanding currently inscrutable diseases and for screening drugs to thwart these conditions. Moreover, because scientists can create reprogrammed cells from adult tissue, the technologies come without the controversy that accompanies methods based on embryonic stem cells. http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/2009_b_description.htm
The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award is shared by three men – Brian Drucker, Nicholas Lydon, and Charles Sawyers – who collaborated on a treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia. Through the work of these three men, a universally fatal cancer (it killed my paternal grandmother) is now truly a chronic disease. While Gleevec is not a cure, it must be taken for the rest of your life as a diabetic would take insulin, the survival rate for CML, which was once 0%, is now 89%. Indeed, Gleevec worked so well in clinical trials, that the trial was ended early and the drug approved by the FDA.
Yesterday, I had the honor to listen to these three men discuss their work on the Leonard Lopate show on NPR. For those of you unfamiliar with Leonard Lopate, his radio program includes interviews with some of the biggest brains around. It is always such a pleasure to listen to Lopate’s show. His guests are always the best and brightest in science, mathematics, literature, dance, the arts, etc. Yesterday’s show was no exception. The three Lasker winners were blest not only with brains that could figure out a complex problem like a treatment for CML, but also were blest with the ability to discuss their work at a level understood by the average listener.
Anyway, here’s a link to the Lasker Awards..
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| The Lasker Foundation Awards -- America's Nobels |
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iglooo101
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Oct 2 @ 12:02PM
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As usual a very deep subject 
a quick bio John_Gurdon
quick bio Shinya_Yamanaka
The Leonard Lopate Show
and finally
a quick ..... what is ........Chronic myelogenous leukemia
Stem Cell..The Jinny...is out of the bottle...I think it is the other nuclear research....when is the bomb? OR are we witnessing,seeing, and hearing about the bomb getting dropped every now and then without having a say. It is the OTHER BOMB. I know we have to have an open mind and this is the price that we have to pay. Stem Cell, could fall in the wrong hands and suddenly we have something at the same level of WMD. But, I think, that is the part of the UNKNOWN that we all have to believe in.
Cancer, known by its name (i.e cancer) for long long time. Cancer
Even Skin cancer was called Skin cancer...in other words, it is not something new, yet, we did not eliminate it yet...it should have been labelled ENEMY OF THE WORLD#1. But, people prefer to direct their resources for things more important, like killing/oppressing other people.
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eastham
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Oct 2 @ 12:43PM
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Funny you should speak of cancer this way as it was one of the topics of discussion on yesterday's show. As we know more and more about cancer, we know how different the "disease" can be as well as discovering new similarities between disparate types of cancer. For example new breakthroughs in the understanding of breast cancer have led to breakthroughs in colon cancer. That said, there are many types of breast cancer, which is why various types of breast cancer are treated differently.
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CHARLIgurl1
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Oct 2 @ 2:16PM
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I remember seeing a documentary about stem cell research a while ago, where they took cells from the base of a spine and replaced them at the top, admittedly it was on a rat, but it showed incredible improvement in the rats condition, (sorry I dont remember what the condition was)
Very interesting.
Of course there was talk on doing this with human foetuses, Im not sure if they ever did start any of that or not.
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eastham
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Oct 2 @ 2:34PM
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The research recognized by the Lasker Foundation has nothing to do with embryonic stem cell research and there was never research done with cell lines from fetuses!
Embryonic stem cells are cultured from 4-5 day old cells. At 8 weeks, an embryo is reclassified as a fetus.
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