Konrad Hochedlinger awarded Genzyme
Fellowship
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (October 20, 2004) — Konrad
Hochedlinger, a postdoctoral associate in the lab of
Whitehead Member Rudolf Jaenisch, has been selected
by a Whitehead committee to receive the Genzyme Postdoctoral
Fellowship at Whitehead Institute. The $90,000 award,
sponsored by the Cambridge-based biotech company, completely
funds Hochedlinger’s postdoctoral position—including
all expenses—for one year.
During Hochedlinger’s five years at Whitehead,
he has made several fundamental contributions to the
world of biology. In 2002, he showed in the journal
Nature that mice can be cloned from mature, highly differentiated
cells—something that hadn’t yet been conclusively
demonstrated. Later that year he was the co-lead author
of a Cell paper that described how embryonic stem cells
cured a mouse of an immune system disease, a paper described
by Jaenisch as the first conclusive proof that therapeutic
cloning works. Recently, with fellow postdoctoral researcher
Robert Blelloch, he cloned mice from melanoma cells,
an experiment that showed that many properties of cancer
can be reversed.
Hochedlinger came to Whitehead in 1999 from the Institute
for Molecular Pathology in Vienna Austria, after hearing
Jaenisch speak at one of the college’s conferences.
“I was fascinated by Rudolf’s talk, and
I knew immediately that I wanted to work with him,”
he says. He then enrolled as a PhD student at the University
of Vienna, conducting all his research in the Jaenisch
lab. After completing his PhD in 2003, he decided to
stay on as a postdoctoral researcher. “I felt
that I needed to complete the work that I’d begun
here,” he says. “There was no other place
that I could go to that had all the intellectual resources
of Rudolf’s lab and the Whitehead community.”
“Konrad is one of the most outstanding coworkers
I have had over the last 20 years,” says Jaenisch.
“He is smart and thinks deeply about science.”
Hochedlinger plans to spend the upcoming year studying
how a particular gene involved in embryonic stem cell
development also contributes to certain types of cancer.
“We’ve benefited from our proximity to
Whitehead in many informal ways,” says Elliott
Hillback, Genzyme’s senior vice president for
corporate affairs. “We are very interested in
the continued growth of high-caliber young scientists
around the Boston area, and that’s why we look
forward to future collaborations with Whitehead.”
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