Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Friday, November 30, 2007
Optical Imaging for Medicine and Biology: Applications in Cancer Detection
8:00AM-4:00PM, Cocktail Hour 4:00-5:00PM
The Photonics Center
8 Saint Mary's Street, 9th Floor
Boston, MA 02215

Host:
Professor Jerome Mertz, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Boston University
College of Engineering
44 Cummington Street
Boston, MA 02215

Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Short Biography of Rakesh K. Jain, Ph.D.

Andrew W. Cook Professor of Tumor Biology, Harvard Medical School, and Director, E. L. Steele Lab of Tumor Biology, Department of Radiation Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Jain is regarded as a pioneer in the fields of tumor biology, drug delivery and in vivo imaging, and is known for integrating bioengineering with tumor pathophysiology. For more than 30 years, he has championed the notion that a solid tumor is an aberrant organ - and not just a collection of cancer cells. To unravel the complex biology of this organ, Dr. Jain developed an impressive array of sophisticated imaging technologies and innovative animal and mathematical models, and employed them in extraordinarily elegant ways. With this undertaking, his team has provided unprecedented molecular, cellular, anatomical and functional insight into the vascular and interstitial biology of solid tumors and the role of host-tumor interactions in tumor physiology and response to therapy. He has also taken this insight from bench to bedside and back. A recent example of this is his seminal hypothesis that antiangiogenic therapy can “normalize” the abnormal tumor vasculature and microenvironment, thereby improving the delivery and efficacy of conventional and novel therapeutics. After providing compelling evidence in support of this hypothesis in a number of animal models, he revealed the molecular underpinnings of vascular normalization, and then went on to validate his preclinical findings in cancer patients receiving Avastin, an anti-VEGF antibody or  Recentin, a pan-VEGF receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor. This emerging concept has changed our thinking about how antiangiogenic agents improve the efficacy of cytotoxic agents and how to combine these agents optimally (Jain, Science, 2005; Nature Clinical Practice Oncology, 2006).

Dr. Jain's capacity to integrate knowledge from bioengineering, optics, mathematics, physiology, immunology and molecular biology is central to his uniquely multidisciplinary approach to tumor biology. He has developed the world's leading laboratory for the quantitative study of vascular and interstitial biology of tumors, has been most generous in sharing his innovative and creatively designed model systems, and has truly enabled much of the progress in this field worldwide.

A mentor to more than 100 master's, doctoral and postdoctoral students from over a dozen different disciplines, and a collaborator of clinicians and scientists worldwide, Dr. Jain's findings are summarized in more than 400 publications and six patents. He has edited seven monographs on topics ranging from bioengineering to cancer.  He serves on advisory panels to government, industry and academia, and is a member of editorial advisory boards of ten journals, including Cancer Research and Nature Reviews Cancer (Highlights). He is a recipient of more than 25 major awards, including Guggenheim Fellowship (1983-1984), Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1990-1991), Research Career Development Award (1980-1985) and Outstanding Investigator Grant (1993-2000) both from the National Cancer Institute (1993-2000), and election to the Institute of Medicine (2003) and National Academy of Engineering (2004) of the United States National Academies. Most recently, he received the Academic Scientist of the Year Award from the Pharmaceutical Achievements Awards (2005) and the Distinguished Service Award from the Nature Biotechnology Miami Symposium (2006).

Background: Rakesh K. Jain was born in Lalitpur, India, on December 18, 1950. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1972 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his MS and PhD degrees in 1974 and 1976 from the University of Delaware, all in chemical engineering. He served as assistant professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University (1976 to 1978), and as assistant (1978-79), associate (1979-83) and full professor (1983-1991) of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, before joining Harvard in 1991. He spent his 1983-84 sabbatical year as a Guggenhiem Fellow in the departments of chemical engineering at MIT, bioengineering at UCSD and radiation oncology at Stanford; and his 1990-91 sabbatical as a Humboldt Senior Scientist-Awardee at the Institute of  Pathophysiology of University of Mainz, and the Institute of Experimental Surgery of University of Munich. Since 1991, Dr. Jain is the Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Tumor Biology in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, and Director of Edwin L. Steele Laboratory of Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Further details about Dr. Jain’s research can be found at http://steele.mgh.harvard.edu

« Back