Dr. Joseph Schlessinger is the present chair of the department of Pharmacology at Yale University, one of the premier universities in the US and the world in general. Previously he was the chair of the dept. of Pharmacology at New York University and the director of the NYU Skirball research facility.
Dr. Schlessinger is considered the ‘father’ of Signal Transduction, an area of research crucial for cancer research (and other fields). This research has already resulted in him receiving numerous awards, including the esteemed Dan David award (in 2006), and has resulted in the development of multiple drugs for treating various cancers.
PubMed, the premier resource for academic publications contains 450 publications for Dr. Schlessinger. In 2003, the English newspaper The Guardian created a list of the greatest scientists of our era, or the “Giants of Science”, and placed Schlessinger at #14, a great honor.
In addition to his academic research, Prof. Schlessinger is involved with and starts biotech companies. His first company, which he co-founded with Dr. Axel Ullrich) was named Sugen, and developed a drug by the name of Sutent for treating renal cell carcinoma and gastrointestinal stromal tumor. This drug was approved by the FDA in 2006 in less than 6 months and is the first time that the FDA has made an exception and had approved a new drug for two separate conditions concurrently. The drug was so effective it was considered immoral to deny it from ill patients.
Later on Dr. Schlessinger co-founded Plexxikon, a company which aims, by using state of the art ways, to rapidly create numerous types of drugs for the treatment of multiple diseases.
It is our hope that Prof. Schlessinger continues doing this prolific research, as we all may benefit from it one day, it gives hope to ill people, and cam be said to make the world a healthier place.
