Shelly Greenfield, HMS professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, was recently awarded the R. Brinkley Smithers Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Greenfield has been invited to receive the award and deliver the keynote plenary address at the society’s annual medical scientific conference in April 2014 in Orlando, Fla.
Greenfield, chief academic officer and chief of the Division of Women’s Health as well as director of clinical and health services research and education in the Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse at McLean, is nationally recognized for her research on substance use disorders, particularly women’s treatment and health services research.
Pier Paolo Pandolfi, George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Genetics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was named director of the Cancer Center and the new Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess.
Pandolfi, the 2011 recipient of the prestigious Pezcoller Foundation-AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) International Award for Cancer Research, is credited with curing acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), a once-deadly form of leukemia, and is at the center of some of the most promising breakthroughs in the race to prevent, treat and cure cancer.
Pandolfi joined the Beth Israel faculty in 2007 from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In his new role, Pandolfi will work along with the director of Beth Israel’s Leon V. & Marilyn L. Rosenberg Clinical Cancer Center to promote excellence in all aspects of cancer care. At Beth Israel, multidisciplinary teams offer 21 specialty patient-care programs, such as those focusing on breast cancer, prostate cancer and biologic therapy.
Pandolfi’s 1998 discovery of the genes that cause acute promyelocytic leukemia and subsequent work on mouse models of APL to develop effective combinatorial targeted treatments resulted in a cure for virtually all patients with this aggressive blood cancer.
Most recently, Pandolfi’s revolutionary work has revealed that non-coding RNAs regulate basic biological processes such as growth and tumorigenesis, thus dispelling long-held beliefs that non-protein coding genes in the human genome were “junk.” This discovery has already sparked the development of new targeted drugs to treat disease in patients.
In 2010, Beth Israel’s cancer program was the only one in Massachusetts, and one of only 34 in the country, to receive the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons.
