期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2020
卷号：117
期号：2
页码：796-798
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1921332117
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：On September 10, 2019, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced that H. Michael Shepard of San Diego-based Biooncology Consultants, Dennis J. Slamon of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Axel Ullrich of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany had been awarded the 2019 Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for their development of the drug Herceptin. Approved in 1998, Herceptin was the first drug of its kind: a monoclonal antibody treatment for cancer. Since its release, Herceptin, which blocks the activation of the HER2 oncogene and can significantly extend lifespan, has helped treat more than 2.3 million women across the globe whose breast cancers are positive for the HER2 gene. PNAS spoke with Shepard, who was at the biotechnology company Genentech during the drug’s development, and Slamon about their achievements. H. Michael Shepard. Image courtesy of Geoffrey Wahl (The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA). Dennis J. Slamon. Image courtesy of University of California, Los Angeles. > PNAS:Dr. Slamon, you graduated with MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1975, in part inspired by your family’s pediatrician. How did you get interested in cancer biology? > Slamon:At the time, a special virus cancer program at [the] NCI [National Cancer Institute] had begun to identify that there were viral-oncogenes that were carried by a family of acutely transformed retroviruses. These were… potent carcinogenic agents. You could take a healthy animal, inject them with one of these viruses, and they would have tumors, in some cases overwhelming tumors, in 14 days. These oncogenes were fascinating to me, so I decided what I’d start to study [was] the potential role of these genes in human cancer (1).
