Supported by the Irving Weinstein Foundation, this lectureship has been established to acknowledge an individual whose outstanding innovations in science and whose position as a thought leader have the potential to inspire creative thinking and new directions in cancer research.
This lectureship is selected by the AACR president, and is not open to nomination.
|
Seventh Lectureship Recipient
Helen M. Blau, Ph.D.
Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Professor
Director, Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
|
Dr. Helen M. Blau (left) delivered her lecture entitled, (Re)-evolutionary Regenerative Medicine, at the AACR 102nd Annual Meeting 2011 in Orlando, FL. The award was presented by Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn (right), AACR past president.
- View list of all past lectureship recipients.
Dr. Helen M. Blau is world renowned for the broad impact of her research on our understanding of maintenance of the differentiated state, cellular reprogramming, regulation of cell fate, as well as skeletal muscle regeneration and stem cell biology. In particular, she is recognized for her unique approach to science, which capitalizes on the continuous development of new research tools to challenge current scientific dogma. In the 1980s, when it was generally accepted that cell differentiation was a "terminal" state, Dr. Blau showed by cell fusion that a cell’s differentiated state is not fixed, but instead is reversible and plastic.
Her work in this area has demonstrated that cellular phenotypes result from the particular balance of regulators present at any given time and may be readily altered. In other words, her work provided surprising evidence that stable differentiated states are maintained by dynamic mechanisms. This concept has been a recurrent underlying theme in most of Dr. Blau’s work, and has recently re-emerged in her studies of regeneration, reprogramming towards pluripotency and stem cell biology. The clinical significance of this concept of plasticity is clear in the area of regenerative medicine. Novel treatments will come from altering cell fate and reprogramming cells by altering the expression of intracellular factors.
In recent groundbreaking work, Dr. Blau proved that terminally differentiated mammalian cells could be induced to dedifferentiate, as they do during the remarkable regenerative process that occurs in newts (salamanders). When the brakes on cell cycle are temporarily removed – by inactivating two tumor suppressors - the cells go just one step back, so they can divide and reproduce while they remain relatively differentiated. This transient controlled inhibition of tumor suppressor activity leads to propagation of cells of known identity and function, constituting a novel approach to modeling diseases in culture and regenerating damaged tissues in the body.
Another major focus of the Blau laboratory’s approach to regenerating skeletal muscle tissue damaged due to disease, injury or aging involves capitalizing on the stem cells present in muscle. Her contributions to this goal include developing strategies to isolate adult stem cells from mouse skeletal tissue and propagate these cells using bioengineered microenvironments that mimic tissue properties. Finally, she has generated a mouse model of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy that mimics the human disease, explaining its etiology and allowing a test of therapeutic strategies. Dr. Blau is now translating this work into humans and is confident that clinical trials that take advantage of her recent findings to treat skeletal muscle wasting in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patients is in the near future.