NEWS
December 2008
Charles D. Gilbert, M.D., Ph.D. is a new member of the Rita Allen Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee. Dr. Gilbert is the Arthur and Janet Ross Professor at Rockefeller University in the Laboratory of Neurobiology. He is also a past Rita Allen Foundation Scholar.
October 2008
We are trying a new approach to announce the Foundation’s Scholars Award in Pain for 2009. The Rita Allen Foundation and the American Pain Society have collaborated to announce the Award in Pain via the American Pain Society website.
- Go to www.ampainsoc.org
- APS Home Page will appear, click on About APS and click on Awards
- Scroll down page to bottom, you'll see Rita Allen Foundation/APS Award in Pain
- Click, you'll see the announcement and the details of applying for the Award
Let's look forward to receiving nominations and to the possibility of awarding two grants in the pain field this year.
October 2008
Milton E. Cassel Scholar, Mark Zylka and his colleagues recently found that Prostatic Acid Phosphatase (PAP) is expressed in pain-sensing neurons and suppresses pain eight times more effectively than morphine. PAP was previously thought to function only in the prostate and was used as a diagnostic marker for prostate cancer. Their paper describing PAP in pain mechanisms was published as the cover article in the October 9, 2008 issue of Neuron (www.neuron.org). The press release summarizing their findings can be found here.
May 2008
Our Scientific Advisory Committee has selected the 2008 Rita Allen Foundation Scholars
Congratulations to:
E. Alejandro Sweet-Cordero - Stanford University Medical School
Emmanuelle A. Passegue - University of California, San Francisco
Ian J. Davis - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Paul Chang - MIT Center for Cancer Research
Aaron D. Gitler - University of Pennsylvania
Ming Li - Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Steven J. Altschuler - University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center
October 2, 2006
Andrew Z. Fire was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of “RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.”
Andrew Z. Fire was a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar from 1989 until 1993. He is currently a professor of genetics and pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
