30.03.2022 The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) awarded Dr. Krzysztof Palczewski from the University of California, Irvine, the 2022 Goodman and Gilman Award in Receptor Pharmacology. The Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman Award in Receptor Pharmacology was established in 1980 to recognize and stimulate outstanding research in pharmacology of biological receptors. Such research might provide a better understanding of the mechanisms of biological processes and potentially provide the basis for the discovery of drugs useful in the treatment of diseases.
Dr. Palczewski is receiving this award in recognition of his innovative and pathfinding studies on mechanisms of activation of G protein-coupled receptors that have advanced understanding of receptor structure, signaling mechanism, defects that lead to disease, and treatments that preserve vision.
Dr. Palczewski is a Donal Bren Professor and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, holds the Irving H. Leopold Chair of Ophthalmology, and is the Director of the Center for Translational Vision Research at the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute. He received his PhD in biochemistry at the Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland and did postdoctoral training at the University of Florida.
Dr. Palczewski’s research utilizes a variety of multidisciplinary approaches to study phototransduction and the visual cycle to characterize the visual system in health and disease. Pursuit of such a comprehensive understanding of vision, including gene expression and transcriptional regulation, is essential to combat genetic defects, metabolic aberrations, and environmental insults leading to blindness. He has identified elements of the signaling pathways of the visual system, through targeted structural biology at different levels of resolution, obtained with classical and time-resolved crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, and cellular cryo-electron tomography. By studying a precise structural and functional account of the participating retinal cells and their intracellular organization with two-photon in vivo and ex vivo microscopy, his work has made groundbreaking advances to recognize biochemical perturbations for early diagnosis of ocular diseases and stratification of patients for the discovery and validation of pharmacological treatments and to prevent retinal degenerative diseases.
Dr. Palczewski has been a member of ASPET since 2015.
The award will be presented at the ASPET Business Meeting and Awards Presentation during the ASPET Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology 2022 on Saturday, April 2 at 4:30 pm in Philadelphia. Additionally, Dr. Palczewski will deliver the award lecture titled G Protein–coupled Receptor Signaling in Phototransduction at the 2022 annual meeting on Sunday, April 3 at 1:00 pm in Philadelphia.
Professor K. Palczewski is the Co-Founder of ICTER. We sincerely congratulate him on receiving this prestigious award.
Source: ASPET | 2022 Award Winners
