Ethan Menahem Shevach (born 1943) is an immunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which in ...

Biography

Shevach obtained his M.D. from

Boston University Medical School The Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, formerly the Boston University School of Medicine, is one of the graduate schools of Boston University. Founded in 1848, the medical school was the first institution in the world t ...

in 1967. After clinical training, he joined NIAID as a senior staff fellow in 1972 becoming head of a research group the following year and a departmental head (section chief) in 1987. As of 2018, he is head of the Department of Cellular Immunology at NIAID. Shevach served as editor-in-chief of the ''Journal of Immunology'' from 1987 to 1992 and edited ''Cellular Immunology'' from 1996 to 2007.

Research

Shevach made significant contributions towards understanding the function of regulatory T cells (T_Reg cells) in mediating the immune response. He discovered a subset of CD4+ T cells that express the

transcription factor In molecular biology, a transcription factor (TF) (or sequence-specific DNA-binding factor) is a protein that controls the rate of transcription of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA, by binding to a specific DNA sequence. The fu ...

FOXP3 and operate by a mechanism that is distinct from the cytokine cascade. Known as T_Reg cells, their primary function is immunosuppressive. These T_Reg cells are targets for therapies against autoimmune diseases, cancer, and transplanted tissue rejection.

Awards

He has been a member of the American Association of Immunologists since 1973 and received its Distinguished Service Award in 1992. In 2004, together with

Shimon Sakaguchi is an immunologist and a Distinguished Professor of Osaka University. He is best known for the discovery of regulatory T cells and to describe their role in the immune system. This discovery is used in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune d ...

, he won the

Cancer Research Institute The Cancer Research Institute (CRI) is a US non-profit organization funding cancer research and based in New York City. They were founded in 1953 to develop immunologically-based treatments for cancer, and despite their name are a funding body fo ...

William B. Coley Award The William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology is presented annually by the Cancer Research Institute, to scientists who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of basic and tumor immunology and whose w ...

for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology for his part in elucidating the function of regulatory T cells in the control of autoimmune diseases. Since 2015,

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...

(now Clarivate) has listed Shevach as among those most likely to win a Nobel Prize, based on his citation record.

References

1943 births Living people 20th-century American physicians 20th-century American biologists 21st-century American scientists 21st-century American physicians 21st-century biologists American immunologists {{US-physician-stub