KU News Release

Respected cancer scientist Brian Druker to give Higuchi lectures Feb. 22 at KU

LAWRENCE — Respected cancer scientist and clinician Brian Druker will be the featured speaker at the 2007 Takeru Higuchi Memorial Lectures at the University of Kansas.

Druker will present a scientific lecture titled “Imatinib (Gleevec) as a Paradigm of Targeted Cancer Therapy” at 9:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 22, in 130 Budig Hall. Druker will speak on “Cancer Therapy in the 21st Century,” at 5:30 p.m. at the Simons Research Laboratories Auditorium on west campus. Both events are free and open to the public.

“Not only is Professor Druker a distinguished scientist and clinician, but he is someone that really cares about finding new cures for cancer that do not depend on just ‘nuking’ cancer cells with the heavy artillery of many of today’s cancer chemotherapies,” said Valentino J. Stella, Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at KU. “He was responsible for the development of one of the major breakthroughs in cancer treatment, the identification of Gleevec for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia.”

Druker’s lectures will address how cancer therapy should be looked at in the 21st century. A major theme of biomedical research at KU’s Lawrence campus and medical school in Kansas City, Kan., is cancer detection and treatment, Stella said.

“Professor Druker’s visit will provide an excellent opportunity for cancer researchers on both campuses to interact with him,” Stella said.

Druker is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the JELD-WEN chair of Leukemia Research at the Oregon Health and Science University Cancer Institute. In 2003, Druker was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. His role in the development of imatinib (Gleevec) and its application in the clinic have resulted in numerous awards, including the John J. Kenney Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the AACR-Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award, the Warren Alpert Prize from Harvard Medical School, the American Society of Hematology’s Dameshek Prize, the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s Pioneer of Survivorship Carpe Diem Award, the American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor, the Kettering Prize from General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, the David A. Karnofsky Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Robert-Koch Award.

This will be the ninth Higuchi lecture in the series, which started in 1989. The series is named after KU professor Takeru Higuchi, who created significant economic activity in the state directly related to his research interests, including the Alza Institute for Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the 1960s and Oread Laboratories in the 1980s. Higuchi died in 1987.

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