Michelson Medical Research Foundation

Last updated
Michelson Medical Research Foundation
Formation2005;19 years ago (2005)
Founder Gary K. Michelson
Headquarters Los Angeles, California
Award(s)Michelson Prizes
Website https://www.michelsonmedicalresearch.org/

The Michelson Medical Research Foundation is a private, non-profit philanthropy founded by orthopedic spinal surgeon and inventor Gary K. Michelson. [1] [2] The foundation aims to solve global health issues by promoting the development of innovative ideas in medicine and bioscience. [3]

Contents

The foundation's co-chairs are Dr. Michelson and his wife, Alya Michelson.

History

The Michelson Medical Research Foundation was founded in 2005 and seeded with $100 million. [4] [5]

In 2017, the foundation, along with the Human Vaccines Project, established the Michelson Prizes: Next Generation Grants, a $20 million initiative to advance innovation in the field of vaccines and immunotherapies through grants. [6] [7] The inaugural winners of the $150,000 awards in June 2018 included the University of Melbourne's Dr. Laura Mackay, Monash University's Dr. Patricia Illing, and Stanford University School of Medicine's Dr. Ansuman Satpathy. [8] [9] 2022 grant winners included Dr. Noam Auslander and Dr. Brittany Hartwell of the University of Minnesota. [10] The 2022 Michelson Philanthropies & Science Prize for Immunology was awarded to Dr. Paul Bastard. [11]

2019 Next Generation Grant winners Dr. Murad Mamedov and Dr. Avinash Das Sahu collaborated on a study, published in August 2023, to identify how gamma-delta T cells recognize and destroy cancer cells. [12]

Initiatives

Beneficiaries

Beneficiaries of the Michelson Medical Research Foundation include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley Plotkin</span> American physician

Stanley Alan Plotkin is an American physician who works as a consultant to vaccine manufacturers, such as Sanofi Pasteur, as well as biotechnology firms, non-profits and governments. In the 1960s, he played a pivotal role in discovery of a vaccine against rubella virus while working at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Plotkin was a member of Wistar’s active research faculty from 1960 to 1991. Today, in addition to his emeritus appointment at Wistar, he is emeritus professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, Vaccines, is the standard reference on the subject. He is an editor with Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, which is published by the American Society for Microbiology in Washington, D.C.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary K. Michelson</span>

Gary K. Michelson is an American orthopedic surgeon, medical inventor, and billionaire philanthropist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wistar Institute</span> American biomedical research institute

The Wistar Institute is an independent, nonprofit research institution in biomedical science with special focuses in oncology, immunology, infectious disease and vaccine research. Located on Spruce Street in Philadelphia’s University City neighborhood, Wistar was founded in 1892 as a nonprofit institution to focus on biomedical research and training.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Frazer</span> Scottish-born Australian immunologist

Ian Hector Frazer is a Scottish-born Australian immunologist, the founding CEO and Director of Research of the Translational Research Institute (Australia). Frazer and Jian Zhou developed and patented the basic technology behind the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer at the University of Queensland. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute, Georgetown University, and University of Rochester also contributed to the further development of the cervical cancer vaccine in parallel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yehuda Shoenfeld</span> Israeli physician

Yehuda Shoenfeld is an Israeli physician and autoimmunity researcher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philippa Marrack</span> English biologist and immunologist based in the US

Philippa "Pippa" Marrack, FRS is an English immunologist and academic, based in the United States, best known for her research and discoveries pertaining to T cells. Marrack is the Ida and Cecil Green Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Research at National Jewish Health and a distinguished professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Colorado Denver.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biomedical sciences</span> Application of science to healthcare

Biomedical sciences are a set of sciences applying portions of natural science or formal science, or both, to develop knowledge, interventions, or technology that are of use in healthcare or public health. Such disciplines as medical microbiology, clinical virology, clinical epidemiology, genetic epidemiology, and biomedical engineering are medical sciences. In explaining physiological mechanisms operating in pathological processes, however, pathophysiology can be regarded as basic science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James P. Allison</span> American immunologist and Nobel laureate (born 1948)

James Patrick Allison is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Akiko Iwasaki</span> Immunobiologist

Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19 and Long COVID.

The USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience is a building at the University of Southern California. The Center is the largest building on the University Park Campus and provides 190,000 square feet of laboratories and office space.

Owen Witte is an American physician-scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, founding director emeritus of the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, and the UC Regents’ David Saxon Presidential Chair in developmental immunology (1989–present). Witte is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator (1986–2016) and a member of the President's Cancer Panel, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Cancer Research Academy of the AACR. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2013 and on numerous editorial boards and scientific advisory boards for academic centers and biotechnology companies.

B. Brett Finlay, is a Canadian microbiologist well known for his contributions to understanding how microbes cause disease in people and developing new tools for fighting infections, as well as the role the microbiota plays in human health and disease. Science.ca describes him as one of the world's foremost experts on the molecular understanding of the ways bacteria infect their hosts. He also led the SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative (SAVI) and developed vaccines to SARS and a bovine vaccine to E. coli O157:H7. His current research interests focus on pathogenic E. coli and Salmonella pathogenicity, and the role of the microbiota in infections, asthma, and malnutrition. He is currently the UBC Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and a Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories, Microbiology and Immunology, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Co-director and Senior Fellow for the CIFAR Humans and Microbes program. He is also co-author of the book Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World and The Whole-Body Microbiome: How to Harness Microbes - Inside and Out - For Lifelong Health. Finlay is the author of over 500 publications in peer-reviewed journals and served as editor of several professional publications for many years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl H. June</span> American immunologist and oncologist

Carl H. June is an American immunologist and oncologist. He is currently the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He is most well known for his research on T cell therapies for the treatment of several forms of cancers. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew McMichael</span>

Sir Andrew James McMichael, is an immunologist, Professor of Molecular Medicine, and previously Director of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford. He is particularly known for his work on T cell responses to viral infections such as influenza and HIV.

Anurag Agrawal is an Indian pulmonologist, medical researcher, Dean of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, and the former director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, a CSIR institution. Known for his studies on lung diseases, Agrawal has been a senior fellow of the DBT-Wellcome Trust. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 2014. He is also a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology which he received in 2015 and the 2020 Sun Pharma Science Foundation award in Medical Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dipyaman Ganguly</span>

Dipyaman Ganguly is an Indian physician-scientist immunologist and cell biologist, currently a Principal Scientist and Swarnajayanthi Fellow at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB). He heads the Dendritic Cell Laboratory of IICB, popularly known as the Ganguly Lab, where he hosts several researchers involved in research on regulation of innate Immunity and pathogenesis of inflammatory disorders. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Mackay</span> Australian scientist

Laura K. Mackay is an internationally-recognised immunologist and Professor of Immunology at the University of Melbourne. Mackay is the Theme Leader in Immunology and Laboratory Head at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. In 2022, she was the youngest ever Fellow elected to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Özlem Türeci</span> German physician, scientist and entrepreneur

Özlem Türeci is a German physician, scientist and entrepreneur. In 2008, she co-founded the biotechnology company BioNTech, which in 2020 developed the first messenger RNA-based vaccine approved for use against COVID-19. Türeci has served as BioNTech's chief medical officer since 2018. Since 2021, she has been Professor of Personalized Immunotherapy at the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Türeci and her spouse, Uğur Şahin, have won a number of awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine</span>

The MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford is a research institute located at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Founded in 1989 by Sir David Weatherall, the institute focuses on furthering our understanding of clinical medicine at a molecular level. It was one of the first institutes of its kind in the world to be dedicated to research in this area.

Philip Greenberg is a professor of medicine, oncology, and immunology at the University of Washington and head of program in immunology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. His research is centered around T cell biology and therapeutic cell therapies. He is a co-founder of Juno Therapeutics.

References

  1. "Gary Michelson". forbes.com. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  2. "How I Made It: Dr. Gary Michelson". articles.latimes.com. 5 June 2011. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  3. "Who We Are". michelsonmedical.org. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
  4. "Dr. Gary K. Michelson: Inventor and life-saver". jewishjournal.com. 31 March 2016. Retrieved 3 April 2017.
  5. Brunner, Allison (2018-12-28). "Dr. Gary K. Michelson: The Benevolent Catalyst". C-Suite Quarterly. Retrieved 2022-09-09.
  6. "Philanthropists play a crucial role in developing vaccines". Financial Times. 2020-05-22. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  7. "Michelson Prizes". humanvaccinesproject.org. Human Vaccines Project. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  8. Institute, The Doherty (2018-06-20). "Dr Laura Mackay wins Michelson Prize for Human Immunology and Vaccine Research". www.doherty.edu.au. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
  9. Melbourne, Andrew Trounson, University of (2018-08-05). "The cells giving our immune system more punch". Pursuit. Retrieved 2022-11-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  10. "Briefings". www.rosalindfranklinsociety.org. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
  11. "2022 Michelson Philanthropies & Science Prize Winners". www.science.org. Retrieved 2023-03-31.
  12. Mamedov, Murad R.; Vedova, Shane; Freimer, Jacob W.; Sahu, Avinash Das; Ramesh, Amrita; Arce, Maya M.; Meringa, Angelo D.; Ota, Mineto; Chen, Peixin Amy; Hanspers, Kristina; Nguyen, Vinh Q.; Takeshima, Kirsten A.; Rios, Anne C.; Pritchard, Jonathan K.; Kuball, Jürgen; Sebestyen, Zsolt; Adams, Erin J.; Marson, Alexander (September 2023). "CRISPR screens decode cancer cell pathways that trigger γδ T cell detection". Nature. 621 (7977): 188–195. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06482-x. ISSN   1476-4687 . Retrieved 20 October 2023.
  13. Clay, Joanna (2017-11-01). "USC's Michelson Hall, new center for convergent bioscience, makes its debut". USC News. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  14. Pfeffer, Jonathan (2018-05-16). "Healthcare Tech Teams Dominate 2018 Wharton Startup Challenge". clearadmit.com. Clear Admit. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  15. "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine — 2017 Annual Report" (PDF). pcrm.org. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  16. Vincent, Roger; Peterson, Melody (4 January 2024). "UCLA will transform dead Westside mall into major science innovation center". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 27 February 2024.
  17. "The Human Vaccines Project". humanvaccinesproject.org. Human Vaccines Project. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  18. "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine [Who We Are]". michelsonmedical.org. Michelson Medical Research Foundation. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  19. Gordon, Larry (2014-01-13). "Surgeon and inventor gives $50 million for USC building". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  20. "UW Research [Who We Are]". michelsonmedical.org. Michelson Medical Research Foundation. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
  21. "Startup Challenge — Enter to win $135,000 in cash and prizes". wharton.upenn.edu. The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 2018-08-08.