Stanford researcher receives award for lifetime achievement in hematology
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Irving Weissman, MD, will receive the Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology at this year’s ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition.
Weissman, director of Stanford Medicine’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, has made several important contributions to hematology over the past 5 decades.
He is best known for his research on , hematopoiesis and hematopoietic stem cells.
Weissman’s laboratory became the first to discover and isolate blood-forming stem cells from mice, according to the ASH release. He later published the first isolation of human blood-forming stem cells.
During clinical trials of women with metastatic breast cancer, Weissman and colleagues uncovered a method to isolate the blood-forming stem cells from cancer cells. This allowed the stem cells to be administered back to patients after chemotherapy as part of further treatment.
“Dr. Weissman and colleagues later discovered that CD47 ... could be targeted with blocking antibodies to treat blood cancers with low-dose azacitidine and drug-resistant lymphomas when paired with rituximab,” the ASH release read. “Dr. Weissman’s work established hematopoietic stem cells as the paradigm for mammalian stem cell biology and transformed the way scientists and physicians approach blood cancers in the lab and clinic.”
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts