Personal Details/ Academic Background:
Professor David Tuveson is an eminent American scientist who currently holds the positions of deputy director of the Cancer Center and director of Cancer Therapeutic Initiative at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), USA. He is also a Professor of Pancreatic cancer Medicine at Cambridge University, UK and a lecturer at Watson School for Biological Sciences at CSHL.
Professor Tuveson graduated with a Bachelor degree in chemistry from MIT, and obtained his M.D. and PhD from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He completed his medical residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and medical oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. Simultaneously, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at MIT.
Professor Tuveson served in numerous key academic and research positions such as an instructor of medicine and associate physician at Harvard Medical School – Dana Farber Cancer Institute, an assistant professor of Medicine in Abramson Family Cancer Institute at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a senior group leader at Cambridge Research Institute. Importantly, he was granted an honorary consultant for oncology in Addenbrooke's NHS Hospital in Cambridge, UK, from 2009 till 2012.
Professor Tuveson participated as chair for many important advisory boards and research foundations in both UK and USA and he is a member of the American Association of Cancer Research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Gastroenterological Association.
Research and Achievements:
The work of professor Tuveson is evidently multifaceted and it involves extensive use of cutting edge technology. In fact, the approaches adopted by his lab at CSHL range widely from designing new model systems of disease to inventing new therapeutic and diagnostic platforms for rapid evaluation in preclinical and clinical settings. He also developed a new method of culturing tissue fragments indefinitely in cell culture, enabling deep analysis with genetic and pharmacological probes. Collectively, the group strategy in the preclinical and clinical arena is codified as the “Cancer Therapeutics Initiative,” and this initiative will provide these same approaches to the entire CSHL cancer community.
Most notably, his lab in Cambridge established a preclinical therapeutics approach to evaluate potential chemoprevention and intervention strategies for pancreatic cancer. Currently, professor Tuveson and colleagues are pursuing means to circumvent the unappreciated critical barrier of delivering drugs to achieve therapeutic intervention in his preclinical model and later in pancreatic cancer patients. Throughout his work, professor Tuveson made massive contributions to the treatment of pancreatic cancer through his focus on improving detection and treatment of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, though his findings did indeed impact many areas of cancer biology.
Professor Tuveson participated in conducting numerous clinical trials as chief investigator and he has been running over 19 active and completed research projects over the last few years. He also participated in many extramural activities as a speaker in over 200 invited lectures in USA, France, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands and others. He is an associate editor in Cancer Research, scientific editor in Cancer Discovery, editor in Oncogene and the academic editor of The Journal of Experimental Medicine. In the same vein, he published over 80 articles, editorials and reviews.
Awards and recognition:
Professor Tuveson has been on the receiving end of many notable awards including:
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of pancreatic disorders, professor David Tuveson is awarded the HAMDAN AWARD FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH EXCELLENCE for the Term 2015-2016.
