The Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research is awarded by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to recognize cancer researchers who are making significant contributions to the understanding of cancer or are improving the treatment of the disease through basic or clinical research. [1] [2]
The prize is awarded biennially to up to three recipients aged 45 or younger, who are selected by a panel of investigators from leading research institutions. Each presents his or her work at a scientific symposium at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, receives a medal and shares a cash award of $150,000. The prize is named after Paul A. Marks, President Emeritus of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Source: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is a cancer treatment and research institution in Manhattan in New York City. MSKCC is one of 72 National Cancer Institute–designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers. Its main campus is located at 1275 York Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets in Manhattan.
Yuan Chang is a Taiwanese-born American virologist and pathologist who co-discovered together with her husband, Patrick S. Moore, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Merkel cell polyomavirus, two of the seven known human oncoviruses.
Josep Baselga i Torres, known in Spanish as José Baselga, was a Spanish medical oncologist and researcher focused on the development of novel molecular targeted agents, with a special emphasis in breast cancer. Through his career he was associated with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology, and the Massachusetts General Hospital in their hematology and oncology divisions. He led the development of the breast cancer treatment Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody, that targets the HER2 protein, which is impacted in aggressive breast cancers.
Todd R. Golub is a professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School, the Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, and the Director and a founding member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Charles L. Sawyers is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator who holds the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). HOPP is a program created in 2006 that comprises researchers from many disciplines to bridge clinical and laboratory discoveries.
Joan Massagué, is a Spanish biologist and the current director of the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the study of both cancer metastasis and growth factors that regulate cell behavior, as well as a professor at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Thomas J. Kelly is an American cancer researcher whose work focuses on the molecular mechanisms of DNA replication. Kelly is director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, the basic research arm of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He holds the Center's Benno C. Schmidt Chair of Cancer Research.
George Bosl is an American cancer researcher, holder of the Patrick M. Byrne Chair in Clinical Oncology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and is a professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College. In 1997, he was appointed chair of the Department of Medicine at Sloan-Kettering, a position which he held until 2015. In 2019, he was named Memorial Sloan Kettering's first ombudsperson.
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 in Houston, Texas. Allison is Regental Professor and Founding-Director of James P. Allison Institute at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize was a $250,000 award given by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation for outstanding oncological research.
Kenneth Offit is an American cancer geneticist and oncologist known for his discoveries with respect to the genetic bases of breast, colorectal, and lymphoid cancers. He is currently Chief of the Clinical Genetics Service and the Robert and Kate Niehaus Chair in Inherited Cancer Genomics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Offit is also a member of the Program in Cancer Biology and Genetics at the Sloan-Kettering Institute and Professor of Medicine and Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell Medical College. He was previously a member of both the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and the Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention working group of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Paul Alan Marks was a medical doctor, researcher and administrator. He was a faculty member and president at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Nathanael S. Gray is an American chemist. He serves as Krishnan-Shah Family Professor of chemical and systems biology at Stanford University and director of cancer therapeutics programme at Stanford University School of Medicine. Previously he was a Nancy Lurie Marks Professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and professor of cancer biology at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. Gray is also co-founder, science advisory board member (SAB) and equity holder in C4 Therapeutics, Gatekeeper, Syros, Petra, B2S, Aduro, Jengu, Allorion, Inception Therapeutics, and Soltego. C4 Therapeutics, which offered IPO in 2020, was founded based on the research of Jay Bradner, current president of Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), and of Nathanael S. Gray, while he was professor at Harvard Medical School. Before moving to Stanford University, Nathanael S. Gray created Center for Protein Degradation at Harvard Medical School with $80 million agreement with Deerfield Management venture capital firm. In 2020, Gray Lab permanently moved to Stanford University, that was stated by Stuart Schreiber, co-founder of Broad Institute as "Stanford's huge gain".
Scott William Lowe is Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is recognized for his research on the tumor suppressor gene, p53, which is mutated in nearly half of cancers.
Nikola Panayot Pavletich is the former chair of structural biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Gregory James Hannon is a professor of molecular cancer biology and director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge while also serving as a director of cancer genomics at the New York Genome Center and an adjunct professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Michel Sadelain is an genetic engineer and cell therapist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, where he holds the Steve and Barbara Friedman Chair. He is the founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the head of the Gene Transfer and Gene Expression Laboratory. He is a member of the department of medicine at Memorial Hospital and of the immunology program at the Sloan Kettering Institute. He is best known for his major contributions to T cell engineering and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, an immunotherapy based on the genetic engineering of a patient's own T cells to treat cancer. Dr. Sadelain is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of France and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Scott Allen Armstrong is an American pediatric oncologist and cancer biologist focused on chromatin-based control of gene expression in cancer and therapeutic discovery. Armstrong and his team were the first to isolate rare leukemia stem cells in a mouse model of leukemia.
Scott Neal Keeney is an American molecular biologist.
Sun Hur is a South Korean-born scientist. She is an Oscar M. Schloss Professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital and an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.