Erkki Ruoslahti - Keynote Speaker


Biography

Erkki Ruoslahti earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki in Finland in 1967. After postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, he held various academic appointments with the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku in Finland and City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. He joined The Burnham Institute in 1979 and served as its President from 1989-2002. He has been a Distinguished Professor at UCSB in Biological Sciences since 2005. His honors include: elected membership to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the European Molecular Biology Organization. He is the recipient of the G.H.A. Clowes Award, Robert J. and Claire Pasarow Foundation Award, Jacobaeus International Prize, The Jubilee Award given by the British Biomedical Society. He was a Nobel Fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 1995, and is an Honorary Doctor of Medicine from the University of Lund, as well as a Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland. Dr. Ruoslahti is the recipient of the 2005 Japan Prize in Cell Biology.

Dr. Ruoslahti’s research is focused on cell adhesion and tumor metastasis. His recent work deals with vascular "zip codes", molecular signatures in the vasculature that are specific for individual tissues and pathological lesions. His laboratory at The Burnham Institute has applied the chemistry of cell-extracellular matrix interactions to develop candidates for drug development. He has developed ways to selectively target drugs to tumor blood vessels in mice and suppress the growth of tumors. He has also found a way to selectively target the lymphatic vessels in tumors. The hope is that selectively delivering therapeutics to tumor blood and lymphatic vessels will increase the efficacy of cancer therapies and decrease side effects.


About his Keynote at BioDiscovery:

"Vascular zip codes in drug and nanodevice targeting"

Dr. Ruoslahti will discuss how our understanding of the unique characteristics of blood vessels in different tissues can assist us in designing smart nanodevice delivery systems for tumors. Since every normal tissue and diseased tissues, too, puts a specific signature on its endothelium, these signatures can serve as zip codes for the delivery of diagnostic probes and therapeutic agents to disease sites.