Fifth Sayer Vision Research Lecture

Dr. Napoleone Ferrara, winner of a 2010 Lasker Award, will deliver the fifth Sayer Vision Research Lecture.

Ferrara, a Fellow at Genentech, Inc., has spent nearly 30 years working to understand the mechanisms of angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels). He is credited with isolating and cloning vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein that plays a key role in angiogenesis. Ferrara and colleagues showed that cancerous tumors are able to grow and spread by attracting new blood vessels to the tumor site and that VEGF inhibition suppresses the growth of tumors by depriving blood supply. Dr. Ferrara went on to develop a VEGF antibody, called Avastin, to treat cancer. This novel agent was approved by the FDA in 2004 for the treatment of metastatic colon cancer.

Ferrara’s laboratory next developed another VEGF antibody called Lucentis for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of vision loss in older Americans. Clinical trials established Lucentis as the first treatment for wet AMD to offer significant visual improvement. Lucentis was approved by the FDA in 2006.

In 2010, Dr. Ferrara was honored with the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for the discovery of VEGF and the development of Lucentis. His laboratory is currently expanding its scope to investigate other tumor growth factors, in particular those produced by myeloid cells and fibroblasts.

In 2006, Dr. Jane Sayer, an NIH research scientist in NIDDK, established the Sayer Vision Research Lecture and Award at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), in partnership with the National Eye Institute (NEI) at NIH, to honor her family and the memory of her parents, Winthrop and Laura Sayer.

The lecture and award series provides an opportunity for honorees to explore areas of interdisciplinary collaboration, such as angiogenesis, that may lead to advances in diverse medical specialties with relevance to vision research. A number of factors place vision science in a position for major advances in the near future-including the large number of identified genes relevant to eye disease and the relative ease with which pathology can be visualized and documented in the eye.

For more information, visit
http://www.nei.nih.gov/news/special/sayer.asp