Background
Slamon is the son of a West Virginia coal miner.
oncologist university professor
Slamon is the son of a West Virginia coal miner.
He attended Washington & Jefferson College for its pre-medical program
He currently serves as director of Clinical/Translational Research at University of California, Los Angeles"s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and as director of the Revlon/University of California, Los Angeles Women"s Cancer Research Program at JCCC. He is a professor of medicine, chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology and executive vice chair for research for University of California, Los Angeles"s Department of Medicine. Slamon also serves as director of the medical advisory board for the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, a fund-raising organization that promotes advances in colorectal cancer. Foreign 12 years, Doctor 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.
A 1975 honors graduate of the University of Chicago"s Pritzker School of Medicine, Slamon earned his Doctor of Philosophy 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 University of California, Los Angeles, Los Los Angeles
His life and research was the template for the plot of the film Living Proof (2008), starring Harry Connick, Junior. 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 Number. 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 University of California, Los Angeles researchers developed models for several cancers, seeing which antibodies worked and which didn"t.