Therapeutic Targeting of the Proteasome in Disease

In honor of Julian Adams, Ph.D., Kenneth C. Anderson M.D., Alfred L. Goldberg, Ph.D. , and Paul G. Richardson, M.D. for their discovery, preclinical and clinical development of Bortezomib (Velcade) to FDA approval and front line therapy for the treatment of patients with multiple myeloma.

Julian Adams

Julian Adams | 2012 Recipient

For the discovery, preclinical and clinical development of  bortezomib to FDA approval and front line therapy for the treatment of patients with multiple myeloma.

Julian Adams, PhD is President of Research and Development at Infinity Pharmaceuticals. Adams is responsible for the full spectrum of Infinity’s drug discovery, preclinical, and clinical development strategy, and regulatory affairs activities. Prior to joining Infinity in 2003, he was the Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery and Development at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. In this capacity he had global responsibility for multiple drug discovery programs, including the successful discovery and development of Velcade® (bortezomib), a proteasome inhibitor for cancer therapy. He joined Millennium through its acquisition of LeukoSite in 1999 where he was Senior Vice President of Research and Development. Adams joined LeukoSite as a result of its acquisition of ProScript, Inc., where he had served as a member of the founding management team, Executive Vice President of Research and Development, and a member of the Board of Directors. Earlier in his career, Adams served in various positions, including Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Boehringer Ingelheim, where he successfully discovered the drug Viramune® (nevirapine) for HIV. Also, from 1982–
1987, he was a medicinal chemist at Merck.

Adams has received many awards, including the 2001 Ribbon of Hope Award for Velcade® from the International Myeloma Foundation. He is an inventor of more than 40 patents and has authored over 100 papers and book chapters in peer reviewed journals. He is the editor of Proteasome Inhibition in Cancer Therapy, published in July 2004.

Adams received his BS from McGill University and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of synthetic organic chemistry.

Opening Remarks

Jeffrey S. Flier, MD

Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Harvard University

Joan S. Brugge, PhD

Louise Foote Pfeiffer Professor of Cell Biology and Chair of the Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School

Alfred L. Goldberg, PhD

Professor of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School Functions of the Proteasome: From Protein Degradation to Drug Development

Julian Adams, PhD

President, Research and Development, Infinity Pharmaceuticals The Discovery and Development of Bortezomib

Kenneth C. Anderson, MD

Kraft Family Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Director of the LeBow Institute for Myeloma Therapeutics and Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Bench to Bedside Translation of Proteasome Inhibitor Therapy in Multiple Myeloma

Paul G. Richardson, MD

Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Clinical Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute The Clinical Development of Bortezomib in Multiple Myeloma: from Single Agent to Combinations and Beyond

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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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