2024 Honorees
James Bradner, M.D. – Award for Medicine
Dr. Bradner is Executive Vice President, Research and Development, and Chief Scientific officer at Amgen, one of the world’s leading biotechnical companies. He is responsible for advancing Amgen’s pipeline, which includes potential first-in-class or best-in-class medicines in all stages of development across the company’s four therapeutic areas of focus: oncology, inflammation, general medicine and rare disease, in addition to biosimilars. He is also responsible for Amgen’s worldwide research efforts. Prior to joining Amgen, Dr. Bradner served as President of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, where he was a member of the Executive Committee of Novartis. His research and leadership have contributed to numerous development programs, multiple investigational new drug applications and positive proof-of-concept studies in clinical investigation. He also has been a clinician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded and built several biotechnology startups. Additionally, he has co-authored dozens of scientific publications and is a named inventor on numerous U.S. patent applications. Dr. Bradner is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Chicago Medical School. He completed his residency in Medicine at Brigham Women’s Hospital, his fellowship in Medical Oncology and Hematology at the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center, and his postdoctoral training in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.
Click here for video: James Bradner Acceptance Speech
The Doris Duke Foundation – Award for Philanthropy
The mission of the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) is to build a more creative, equitable and sustainable future by investing in artists and the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research, child well-being and greater mutual understanding among diverse communities. Doris Duke was a significant supporter of medical research, making contributions to hospitals and research centers throughout her life. In her will, which guides our focus areas, she expressed her interest in advancing “medical research designed to effectuate cures of major diseases.” Through the Medical Research Program, DDF strives to advance the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human disease by strengthening and supporting clinical research. Visit www.dorisduke.org to learn more.
Click here for video: The Doris Duke Foundation Acceptance Speech
Carl H. June, M.D. – Award for Medicine
Dr. June maintains a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. In 2011, his research team published findings detailing a new therapy in which patients with refractory and relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. The June laboratory has published more than 500 publications and has a google scholar h-index of 175 with100,000 citations. He currently serves as the Richard W. Vague Professor in immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and as the Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, as well as the Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including his election into the National Academies of Medicine and Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Click here for video: Carl June Acceptance Speech
Nicholas Lydon, Ph.D. – Award for Clinical Development
Dr. Lydon is a scientific founder of Blueprint Medicines and has served as a member of its Board of Directors since April 2011. He is a co-Founder of IDRx, Inc., and a co-Founder of Recludix Pharma Inc. and serves on its Board of Directors and as a scientific advisor. Dr. Lydon is a Managing Member of VB Therapeutics LLC, which he co-founded in 2019; a Managing Member of Staurus Biopharma, LLC, a privately held biopharmaceutical company that he co-founded. He is a co-founder of AnaptysBio Inc. and formerly a scientific advisor and member of its Board of Directors. Dr. Lydon was a scientific advisor and member of the Board of Directors of Ambit Biosciences Corp., a biopharmaceutical company focused on kinase inhibitor therapeutics; and a Vice President, Small Molecule Drug Discovery at Amgen, Inc. Prior to joining Amgen, Dr. Lydon founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Kinetix Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of selective protein kinase inhibitors, which was acquired by Amgen in 2000. In the late-1990s, he worked for Ciba-Giegy AG (now Novartis AG), where he was responsible for the tyrosine protein kinase program, including the discovery and preclinical development of imatinib (Gleevec). Dr. Lydon has been awarded the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the Kettering Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation and the Japan Prize for his role in the discovery and development of imatinib. In addition to Imatinib, Dr Lydon is involved in the discovery and development of a number of drugs that address c-Kit driven diseases, including Avapritinib (GIST and Mastocytosis) and IDRX-42 (GIST). Dr. Lydon received a B.S. in biochemistry and zoology from the University of Leeds, England, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Medical Sciences Institute, University of Dundee, Scotland.
Click here for video: Nicholas Lydon Acceptance Speech
Stuart Schreiber, Ph.D.
Dr. Schreiber is the Morris Loeb Research Professor at Harvard University, Founding Core Member of the Broad Institute, Emeritus; Founding CEO of Arena BioWorks, (a Biomedical Research Institute formed to understand the mechanism of human disease and to translate insights into transformational medicines); and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His lab integrates chemical biology and human biology to advance the science of therapeutics. He has developed systematic ways to explore biology, especially disease biology, using small molecules that have advanced the field of chemical biology. Key advances include the discovery that small molecules can function as “molecular glues” that promote protein–protein interactions, the co-discovery of mTOR and its role in nutrient-response signaling, the discovery of histone deacetylases and that chromatin marks regulate gene expression, the development and application of diversity-oriented synthesis to microbial therapeutics, and the discovery of vulnerabilities of cancer cells linked to genetic, lineage and cell-state features, including ferroptotic vulnerabilities. His approach to therapeutics discovery guided the development of 14 biotechnology companies that he founded, including initially Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Ariad Pharmaceuticals. These efforts have led to 17 first-in-class therapeutic agents that have either been approved or continue in clinical testing. His research has been acknowledged through awards including the Wolf Prize in Chemistry.
Kevan Shokat, Ph.D. – Award for Basic Science
Dr. Shokat is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco and Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College in 1986, his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at UC Berkeley with Professor Peter Schultz and carried out post-doctoral work in cellular immunology at Stanford University with Professor Chris Goodnow. Dr. Shokat’s research group is focused on the discovery of new small molecule tools and drug candidates targeting protein/lipid kinases, GTPases, and RNA helicases. His laboratory utilizes the tools of synthetic organic chemistry, protein engineering, structural biology, biochemistry and cell biology. He has been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023 he was awarded the Vollum Prize from Reed College, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery and the Sjöberg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for “discoveries that enable the inhibition of mutated K-Ras in cancer treatment” and the Heath Memorial Award Lecture from MD Anderson Center. This year, he was awarded the Edward E. Smissman Award by the ACS Medicinal Chemistry division. He has commercialized discoveries from his laboratory through co-founding several biotechnology companies, including Intellikine, Araxes, Wellspring Biosciences, Kura Oncology, eFFECTOR Therapeutics, Mitokinin, Revolution Medicines, Erasca and Kumquat Biosciences.
Click here for video: Kevan Shokat Acceptance Speech