Today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that OHSU Knight Cancer Institute Director Brian Druker, M.D., has been awarded the 2019 Sjöberg Prize for his “ground-breaking contributions to the clinical development of targeted therapy directed against genetic aberrations in cancer.” His research proved it was possible to shut down cells that enable cancer to grow without harming healthy ones – a discovery that helped make once-fatal forms of the disease manageable.
Druker shares the 2019 award with Dennis Slamon, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Sjöberg Prize laureates for 2017 include 2018 Nobel Prize winner James P. Allison, Ph.D., and Tony Hunter, Ph.D.; and laureates for 2018 include Zhu Chen, Ph.D., Anne Dejean, Ph.D., and Hugues de Thé, Ph.D.
The Sjöberg Prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and funded by the Sjöberg Foundation. The foundation was created in 2016 by the late entrepreneur Bengt Sjöberg to support research targeting cancer, health and the environment. Druker and Slamon will equally share the prize of $1 million prize – $100,000 as a personal award and $900,000 for future research. The laureates will formally receive the award during the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting March 31, in Stockholm, Sweden, in the presence of His Majesty the King of Sweden.
"I am deeply honored to receive this prize and to join the company of the previous Sjöberg Prize award recipients, whom I hold in the highest regard," said Druker, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research at OHSU. “Cancer research has advanced tremendously since I began my career as a physician-scientist: we’re seeing success in targeted therapies, and in immune therapies that activate a patient’s immune system to destroy cancer cells. I am thankful to the patients who went on this journey with me, but we know there is more work to be done, and our team is dedicated to accelerating progress to free the world from the burden of cancer.”
“Dr. Druker’s pioneering work shaped the field of targeted cancer therapies and has provided hope to countless patients and their families,” said OHSU President Danny Jacobs, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.S. “The OHSU community is delighted that his accomplishments are being honored with this important award, and we join him in his ongoing efforts to end cancer as we know it.”
