Neha Patil (Editor)

Don W. Cleveland

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Nationality
  
United States

Other academic advisors
  
William Rutter

Field
  
Aneuploidy

Doctoral advisor
  
Marc W. Kirschner

Residence
  
California, United States

Don W. Cleveland wwwtmdacjpTMDUeiscisp2012imagesclevelandjpg

Born
  
August 26, 1950 (age 66)Waynesville, Missouri (
1950-08-26
)

Fields
  
Centromeres, aneuploidy and tumorigenesisMechanism and therapy in human neurodegenerative disease

Institutions
  
Ludwig Cancer ResearchUniversity of California, San DiegoJohns Hopkins University

Notable awards
  
National Academy of Sciences, 2006American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006Institute of Medicine, 2012

Academic advisors
  

Don W. Cleveland (born 1950 in Waynesville, MO) is an American cancer biologist and neurobiologist.

Contents

Cleveland is currently the Department Chair of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Neurosciences at the University of California at San Diego, and Head, Laboratory for Cell Biology at the San Diego branch of Ludwig Cancer Research.

Biography

Cleveland grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He earned a B.S. in physics in 1972 from New Mexico State University, and graduated as the valedictorian for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Cleveland started graduate school at Princeton University in 1972, switching mid-year into biochemistry. He worked with Marc Kirschner and graduated with a PhD in 1977. As a graduate student, Cleveland provided the initial identification and characterization of tau, showing it to have characteristics of a natively unfolded protein. Tau is now recognized to misaccumulate in Alzheimer's disease and to be the basis for chronic brain injury. He also developed and published a peptide fingerprinting technique that was so popular that it became a citation classic Cleveland did postdoctoral work with William J. Rutter at the University of California at San Francisco from 1978 to 1981. Cleveland was the first to clone tubulin actin and keratin

From 1981 through 1995, Cleveland was on the faculty of the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1995, he accepted a position at the San Diego Branch of Ludwig Cancer Research at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2008, he has been Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.

Contributions to Science

Cleveland has made pioneering discoveries of the mechanisms of chromosome movement and cell-cycle control during normal cellular division, as well as of the principles of neuronal cell development and their relationship to the defects that contribute to inherited neurodegenerative disease. Cleveland's research looks at the molecular genetics of axonal growth and motor neuron disease and the cell biology of mammalian chromosome movement.

Most recently, his research has achieved a significant breakthrough in treating Huntington's disease, an inherited and degenerative brain disorder for which there is no cure. A one-time injection of a new DNA-based drug treatment - known as ASO (short for antisense oligonucleotide) - blocked the activity of the gene whose mutation causes the disease. A single treatment silenced the mutated gene responsible for the disease, slowing and partially reversing progression of the fatal neurodegenerative disorder in animal models. This drug, called IONIS-HTTRx, was developed by scientists at Ionis Pharmaceuticals in collaboration with partners CHDI Foundation, Roche Pharmaceuticals and academic collaborators at University of California, San Diego and is now in a Phase 1/2a clinical study.

Books

Cell and Molecular Biology of the Cytoskeleton: Molecular Mechanisms Controlling Tubulin Synthesis Edited by Jerry W. Shay (Plenum Press, 1986), ISBN 978-1-4612-9269-2

With Toni L. Williamson, Mouse Models in the Study of Genetic Neurological Disorders: Mouse Models of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Edited by Brian Popko (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999), ISBN 0-306-45965-5

With Nicholas G. Theodorakis, Control of Messenger RNA Stability: Translationally Coupled Degradation of Tubulin mRNA Edited By Joel Belasco and George Brawerman (Academic Press, Inc., 1993) ISBN 0-12-084782-5

Select honors

Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2006

Elected Member, Institute of Medicine (IOM), 2012

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Microbiology, 2006

Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2009

President, American Society for Cell Biology, 2013

Sheila Essey Prize, American Academy of Neurology, April, 1999

Outstanding Scientist Award, Playing to Win for Life Foundation, September, 2004

Wings Over Wall Street and MDA Outstanding Scientist, October, 2007

2012 Research Award, The Huntington's Disease Society of America

Katharine Berkan Judd Award, Memorial Sloan Kettering, 2012

The Ricketts Award, University of Chicago, 2012

The Gerson Distinguished Scholar Award, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2014

Essey Prize for ALS Research, The ALS Association, 2014

UCSD Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Scholar Mentoring, 2014

Thomas Reuters' 2015 listing of "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds" 2015

Lab members

Current http://cmm.ucsd.edu/cleveland/dwclab_009.htm

Previous http://cmm.ucsd.edu/cleveland/dwclab_010.htm

All Cleveland publications

http://cmm.ucsd.edu/cleveland/dwclab_003.htm

References

Don W. Cleveland Wikipedia


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