2017年Warren Alpert Foundation Prize Recipients主要颁给了5位在肿瘤免疫抑制剂临床前研究和开发做出巨大贡献的科学家，他们的贡献改变了肿瘤领域的治疗。
颁奖时间：OCTOBER 5, 2017 -1:30PM TO 5:00PM，
地点：Harvard Medical School
The Joseph B.Martin Conference Center
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
Boston, MA 02115
For their collective contributions to the pre-clinical foundation and development of immune checkpoint blockade, a novel form of cancer therapy that has transformed the landscape of cancer treatment.
陈列平教授也成为了第二位华人获得此奖项，此前在2015年6月4日，沃伦·阿尔珀特奖基金会（Warren Alpert Prize Foundation）官网宣布，2015年度沃伦·阿尔珀特奖授予中国中医科学院（原中国中医研究院）研究员屠呦呦，以表彰因其在抗疟领域的突出贡献。
关于沃伦·阿尔珀特奖
沃伦·阿尔珀特奖是由沃伦·阿尔珀特基金会与哈佛大学医学院联合授予的，由已故的慈善家沃伦·阿尔珀特先生于1987年设立，以推动人类在生物医学方面的研究。至今，已有51位科学奖获此殊荣，其中有7位获得诺贝尔奖。屠呦呦是第一位获得此奖的中国科学家。
The mission of the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize is to recognize and honor one or more scientists whose scientific research achievements have led to the prevention, cure or treatment of human diseases or disorders, and/or whose research constitutes a seminal scientific finding that holds great promise of ultimately changing our understanding of or ability to treat disease.
Prize Value
The value of the prize is U.S. $500,000 (to be split equally if more than one recipient is selected), a citation and plaque.
A special scientific symposium in honor of the recipiet(s) is held each year on the first Thursday in October at Harvard Medical School.
Lieping Chen M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Lieping Chen obtained his medical degree in 1982 from Fujian Medical School, China. After completion of his training in hematology and oncology at Fujian Union Hospital and Beijing Union Medical College, Dr. Chen earned a Ph.D. in experimental pathology from Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, in 1990, Dr. Chen began his work at the Bristol-Myers Squib Company as a research scientist. In 1997, he became an immunology professor at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, where he discovered the B7-H1 (PD-L1) molecule and the role of the B7-H1/PD-1 pathway in the evasion of tumor immunity. In 2004, he joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he helped initiate the first-in-man clinical trial using antibodies to block the B7-H1/PD-1 pathway for the treatment of human cancer. Dr. Lieping Chen currently serves as the United Technologies Corporation Professor in Cancer Research, Professor of Immunobiology, Dermatology and Medical Oncology at Yale School of Medicine and co-Director of the Cancer Immunology Program of Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, CT. Dr. Chen has authored more than 300 scientific publications and has served on several committees and advisory boards for state, federal, and international research organizations and pharmaceutical companies. His honors include the William B. Coley Award (2014) and the AAI-Steinman Award (2016).
Arlene Sharpe M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Sharpe received her A.B. from Harvard University, where she did undergraduate thesis research in the laboratory of Dr. Jack Strominger. She received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard Medical School where she did PhD thesis research on reovirus pathogenesis in the laboratory of Dr. Bernard Fields. She completed residency training in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute.
She currently is the George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology, Head of the Division of Immunology, and Interim Co-Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Dr. Sharpe is the Co-Director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has served as a member and chair of the NIH Hypersensitivity, Autoimmunity and Immune-mediated diseases (HAI) study section and is currently a member of NIAID Council. She is also the President of the American Association of Immunologists.
Dr. Sharpe’s laboratory currently investigates the roles of T cell costimulatory and coinhibitory pathways in regulating T cell tolerance and effective antimicrobial and antitumor immunity, and translating fundamental understanding of T cell costimulation into new therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer. Dr. Sharpe has published over 300 papers and was listed by Thomas Reuters as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2014 and 2015 and a 2016 Citation Laureate. She received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor immunology in 2014 for her contributions to the discovery of PD-1 pathway.
Gordon Freeman Ph.D.
Dr. Freeman grew up in Fort Worth, Texas where he was introduced to scientific research in his high school’s research lab and an NSF summer program at the University of Texas, Austin. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard, doing structural work in Don Wiley’s lab. He then did his PhD work with Alice Huang at Harvard Medical School on animal virus genetics. He did post-doctoral work on genes regulating T cell activation, first with Harvey Cantor and then Lee Nadler at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1994 and Professor in 2015.
Dr. Freeman’s laboratory focuses on the identification and function of T cell costimulatory and coinhibitory pathways in regulating T cell activation and application of this knowledge to the development of more effective immunotherapies for cancer, infections, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. Dr. Freeman has published over 300 scientific papers and holds over 50 US patents on immunotherapies. He was listed by Thomas Reuters as a 2016 Citation Laureate for contributions to the field of Physiology or Medicine. He received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology in 2014 and the Laguna Biotech CEO Forum award for his contributions to the discovery of the PD-1 pathway. His contributions to the development of PD-1 immunotherapy for Hodgkin lymphoma received the Lymphoma Hub award for best research paper in lymphoma in 2014.
James Allison Ph.D.
Dr. Allison showed that the molecule CTLA-4 is an inhibitory receptor that serves as a checkpoint to limit the expansion of T cells and pioneered the concept of blocking CTLA-4 to enhance immune responses to tumor cells. He developed an antagonistic anti-CTLA-4 antibody and based on elegant laboratory experiments, he convinced pharmaceutical companies and clinicians to conduct trials with anti-CTLA-4. Clinical trials in patients with metastatic melanoma demonstrated a survival benefit, which led to the approval of anti-CTLA-4 by the US Food and Drug Administration in March 2011. Anti-CTLA-4 represents a rationally designed mechanistic immunotherapy agent that is now a standard of care for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. This seminal work led to the identification of another checkpoint, PD-1, which also enhances anti-tumor responses and has been approved by the FDA for the treatment of melanoma and several other types of cancer. Thus, Allison’s work opened a new field termed “immune checkpoint therapy” and other agents are being developed to target additional inhibitory or co-stimulatory T-cell molecules. Dr. Allison translated his research work on T cells into a breakthrough therapeutic modality that has transformed cancer treatment and is saving lives worldwide.
Tasuku Honjo M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Tasuku Honjo is Professor of Department of Immunology and Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University, and also Chairman of Board of Directors, Shizuoka Prefectural University Corporation. Dr. Honjo is well known for his discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation. He has established the basic conceptual framework of class switch recombination starting from discovery of DNA deletion (1978) and S regions (1980), followed by elucidation of the whole mouse immunoglobulin heavy-chain locus. Aside from class switching recombination, he discovered PD-1 (program cell death 1), a negative coreceptor at the effector phase of immune response and showed that PD-1 modulation contributes to treatments of viral infection, tumor and autoimmunity. Cancer immunotherapy with PD-1 blockade has been approved for many types of cancer and revolutionalized the concept of cancer treatment. For these contributions, Dr. Honjo has received many awards, including Imperial Prize (1996), Japan Academy Prize (1996), Robert Koch Prize (2012), Order of Culture (2013), Tang Prize (2014), William B. Coley Award (2014), Richard V. Smalley, MD Memorial Award (2015), Kyoto Prize (2016), The Keio Medical Science Prize (2016) and Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in Biomedicine (2016). Honored by the Japanese Government as a person of cultural merits (2000). Elected as a foreign associate of National Academy of Sciences, USA in 2001, as a member of Leopoldina, the German Academy of Natural Scientists in 2003, and also as a member of Japan Academy in 2005.
