Table of Contents

George Prendergast - Lankenau Institute for Medical Research

October 26 2011
11:00 DKFZ Main Auditorium
Host: Michael Platten.


Biosketch George Prendergast

George C. Prendergast, Ph.D. is Professor and President/CEO at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR) located outside Philadelphia. He is an internationally recognized molecular and cellular biologist in the areas of cancer and cancer therapeutics with over 200 publications, 30 patents and 3 start-up companies in these areas. Dr. Prendergast has pioneered the study of genes that control cancer progression by modifying signal trafficking processes in cells, most recently focusing on the IDO pathway of immune control from which a novel chemoimmunotherapy to improve cancer treatment was developed. Dr. Prendergast is a former Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences whose research has been supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), DoD Cancer Research Programs, the American Cancer Society, and many private foundations. He has served as a chartered member of the NIH Drug Discovery and Molecular Pharmacology study section as well as numerous grants review, advisory, and editorial boards, most notably in his present role as Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Research, the world’s most highly cited journal in the field. His textbooks on cancer drug discovery (Molecular Cancer Therapeutics: Strategies for Drug Discovery and Development) and cancer immunochemotherapy strategies (Cancer Immunotherapy: Immune Suppression and Tumor Growth) have been reviewed and recommended by the New England Journal of Medicine and have been recognized as leading texts in the field. A native of Philadelphia, Dr. Prendergast attended the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and Princeton University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 1989, before receiving advanced training an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the New York University School of Medicine through 1991. He subsequently worked in the Department of Cancer Research at Merck Research Laboratories before being appointed to the faculty of The Wistar Institute in 1993. In 1999, Dr. Prendergast split his effort at Wistar with work at the DuPont Pharmaceutical Company where he served as Senior Director in the Cancer Research Group. In 2002, Dr. Prendergast moved his research groups at Wistar and DuPont to the Lankenau Institute of Medical Research where as President and CEO he has created a novel ‘acapreneurial’ model for non-profit biomedical research that closely integrates in the same environment clinical, basic, public health and commercial research elements to speed the translation of new discoveries to patients.