Four scientists have won a Lasker prize for work that includes the discovery of a hormone appetite mediation and discover a protein that stimulates the growth of blood vessels. The Laskers are generally considered the most prestigious award in the US for biomedical research.
Douglas Coleman, who retired from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, after a career studying diabetes and obesity, and Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the University Rockefeller in New York, will share the Albert Lasker award for basic medical research for their discovery of the hormone leptin. Fat cells release leptin in the blood and helps control appetite.
An intriguing discovery Coleman described in the late 1960s opened the way for the discovery: It was found that the blood flows sewing together of two mice, one with a disease like diabetes and healthy, caused the healthy animal to begin to reject food. Coleman was assumed that the mouse diabeticlike had released a substance into healthy animals which dampened his appetite. Nearly 30 years later, Friedman identified the protein responsible for what he called leptin after the Greek word "leptos" to "thin." Since the late 190s, there was a huge interest in the operation of leptin as a weight loss drug, but so far, it is proven effective for a small number of people who have a mutation in the receiver of the leptin gene. Yet the discovery of leptin has led to an explosion of interest and new knowledge in appetite and obesity in which the hormone has a central role. "I would not dream leptin so important," said Coleman in an interview.
Clinically, Napoleone Ferrara of Genentech (now owned by the pharmaceutical company Roche), South San Francisco, California, won the award for clinical medical research Lasker ~ DeBakey for 25 years work on angiogenesis, the process by which the body develops new blood vessels. He began the research while a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco; in 1989, shortly after moving Genentech, he discovers the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein essential for the growth of blood vessels. "I'm actually committed to do something different," said Ferrara in an interview, but it "had discretion" to continue its work on the side of angiogenesis. Ferrara and his colleagues in academia and Genentech then developed a drug that treats macular degeneration by inhibiting VEGF and prevention of abnormal blood vessels form in the retina. This treatment, ranibizumab (trade name Lucentis) was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 06. Genentech has also developed a closely related drug, bevacizumab (Avastin brand name) that fight against cancer stifling tumor blood supply. "I feel very fortunate to have been able to follow this story all the way from the beginning," said Ferrara.
The Lasker ~ Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science went to David Weatherall of Oxford University in the UK for decades of work, from the 1950s on thalassemia hereditary disease blood.
Each prize comes with $ 250,000, and winners will be honored at a ceremony next Friday. More information on this year's winners can be found here.
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