TSRI researchers win key prizes

Scripps Research Institute professors Peter K. Vogt, Ph.D., and Martin Friedlander, M.D., Ph.D., recently received significant recognition from the scientific community.

Vogt, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine, was given the National Foundation for Cancer Research’s Fifth Annual Szent-Györgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research.

Friedlander, a national leader in the development of new approaches to the treatment of neovascular eye diseases, received The Jewish Guild for the Blind’s 2010 Alfred W. Bressler Prize in Vision Science.

A news release announcing Vogt’s award, stated: “His research, which began on a humble chicken virus in the early 1960s, has profoundly changed biology and medicine. His groundbreaking discovery of src, the first cancer-causing gene, or oncogene, launched a new era for cancer research and made seminal contributions to our present understanding of the role of oncogenes, proto-oncogenes and many other critical molecular mechanisms of cancer.”

Friedlander, Vogt’s colleague at the institute and the other recent prize recipient, is a professor in the Department of Cell Biology and the Graduate Program in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. He is also staff ophthalmologist and chief of retina service at Scripps Clinic and Green Hospital.

According to a news release, “The Bressler Committee chose Friedlander because of his extraordinary work with cell biological research and clinical issues of retinal disease, subjects he has pursued from his early days as a junior faculty member in Nobel Laureate Gunter Blobel’s lab at The Rockefeller University in New York.”