William G. Kaelin Jr., M.D., the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Senior Physician-Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, will give the second annual Coleman R. Seskind, M.D., Lecture on Tuesday, October 17th at 4:30pm in the Biological Sciences Learning Center, Room 109. The title of his talk will be “The von Hippel-Lindau Hereditary Cancer Syndrome: Insights into Oxygen Sensing and Drugging the Undruggable.”
Dr. Kaelin received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the 2016 the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and the American College of Physicians. He previously served on the National Cancer Institute Board of Scientific Advisors, the AACR Board of Trustees, and the Institute of Medicine National Cancer Policy Board.
Dr. Kaelin’s research seeks to understand how, mechanistically, mutations affecting tumor-suppressor genes cause cancer. His laboratory is currently focused on studies of the VHL, RB-1, and p53 tumor suppressor genes. His long-term goal is to lay the foundation for new anticancer therapies based on the biochemical functions of such proteins. His work on the VHL protein helped to motivate the eventual successful clinical testing of VEGF inhibitors for the treatment of kidney cancer. Moreover, this line of investigation led to new insights into how cells sense and respond to changes in oxygen, and thus has implications for diseases beyond cancer, such as anemia, myocardial infarction, and stroke.
The Coleman R. Seskind, M.D., Lecture is a new annual lectureship in the Biological Sciences Division. The award features a visiting lecturer working in any field represented in the Biological Sciences Division (BSD) who is a Nobel Laureate, Lasker Award winner, or other prominent scientist, and who will engage with faculty and students. The lectureship was established in 2021 by a generous gift from Coleman R. Seskind, M.D., a retired private practice physician and alumnus of the College and The Pritzker School of Medicine who previously worked in the Department of Pathology at the University of Chicago.
To learn more about the Coleman R. Seskind. M.D., Lecture, please visit the lecture series page.
To view full event details, visit the University Calendar.
