Denny Slamon

Dennis Joseph Slamon (born August 6, 1948), is an American oncologist and chief of the division of Hematology-Oncology at UCLA. He is best known for his work identifying the HER2/neu oncogene that is amplified in 25-33% of breast cancer patients and the resulting treatment trastuzumab.

Slamon is the son of a West Virginia coal miner. He attended Washington & Jefferson College for its pre-med program.

He currently serves as director of Clinical/Translational Research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

In 1986 Axel Ullrich, a German scientist working at Genentech, first discovered the Her-2 protein and gave a conference about it in which Slamon was present and afterwards Slamon proposed to work together, since he suspected that a mutation in Her-2 might cause cancer, eventually they found a kind of aggressive breast cancer with a mutation in the gene responsible for the Her-2 protein and started working on producing an antibody to block that protein, hoping to create a new breast cancer treatment, however Genentec had serious administrative conflicts regarding the direction of their research at the time and they refused to fund their research, with Ullrich leaving the company.
Despite not working at Genentec Slamon kept insisting, which led to him being known and disliked among the staff, but eventually he convinced a group of Genentec scientists and got funds to do a small study, which proved the efficacy of the Her-2 antibody in fighting breast cancer which convinced Genentec to launch a full scale research and development effort, which concluded in the creating of new more effective breast cancer treatments.

For 12 years, Dr. Slamon and his colleagues conducted the laboratory and clinical research that led to the development of the new breast cancer drug Herceptin, which targets a specific genetic alteration found in about 25 percent of breast cancer patients. To acknowledge Slamon's accomplishments, President Bill Clinton appointed Slamon to the three-member President's Cancer Panel in June 2000.

A 1975 honors graduate of the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine, Slamon earned his Ph.D. in cell biology that same year. He completed his internship and residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics, becoming chief resident in 1978. One year later, he became a fellow in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at UCLA, Los Angeles.

Slamon and his colleagues set out to find ways to target their treatments. They took breast cancer cells and mimicked what was happening in their patients, looking at genetic alterations in the genes that regulate growth. One of them was a gene called HER-2, human epidermal growth factor receptor No. 2.
The researchers saw that women who had the HER-2 alteration weren't doing as well because they had a more aggressive tumor. That made it a logical target. Slamon's group found that when they added an antibody to the receptor that the gene made when it mutated, the tumor growth rate dropped dramatically.
The process of identifying the target and validating it in the laboratory worked not just for breast cancer, but for other major malignancies, he said. The UCLA researchers developed models for several cancers, seeing which antibodies worked and which didn't.

Popular culture

His life and research was the template for the plot of the film '' Living Proof'' (2008), starring Harry Connick, Jr. Slamon's cancer research is discussed in the second episode of '' Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies''.

Honors and awards

*2002 Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine
*2007 Gairdner Foundation International Award
*2017 Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction
*2019 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
*2019 Sjöberg PrizeThe Sjoberg Foundation
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References

External links

Dr. Dennis Slamon: The Search for a Cure for Breast Cancer (Interview)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Slamon, Dennis
Living people
American health activists
American medical researchers
People from New Castle, Pennsylvania
Washington & Jefferson College alumni
Pritzker School of Medicine alumni
Cancer researchers
American oncologists
University of California, Los Angeles faculty
1948 births
Activists from California
Fellows of the AACR Academy