From Drug Delivery to Tissue Engineering: Bioengineering and its Impact on Human Health

In honor of Robert Langer, Sc.D., and Alian Carpentier, M.D., Ph.D. for their extraordinary contributions to medicine and innovations in bioengineering.

Opening Remarks

Jeffrey S. Flier, MD

Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Harvard University

Presentations

Alain F. Carpentier, MD, PhD

Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery, Hôptial Européen Georges-Pompidou

Bioengineering and Its Impact on Cardiac Surgery

Robert S. Langer Jr., ScD

David H. Koch Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Biomaterials and Biotechnology: From the Development of Controlled Drug Delivery Systems to the Foundation of Tissue Engineering

David J. Mooney, PhD

School of Applied Engineering and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University

Infection-Mimicking Polymers as a Cancer Vaccine

Sangeeta Bhatia, MD, PhD

Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cancer Nanotechnology to Hepatic Tissue Engineering

William Shih, PhD

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University

DNA Nanostructures as Building Blocks for Future Therapeutics

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I am extremely honored to receive the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize. I am very happy that our discovery of PD-1 and our subsequent 10-year basic research on PD-1 led to its clinical application as a novel cancer immunotherapy. I hope this development will encourage many scientists working in the basic bio-medical field.
- Tasuku Honjo

Tasuku Honjo | 2017 Recipient

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.

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