Name Helen Hobbs | ||
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Jci s conversations with giants in medicine helen hobbs
Helen Hobbs is a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who won a 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2015 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. She helped find that people with hypomorphic PCSK9 mutations had lower LDL levels, and were almost immune to heart disease. This discovery helped lead to cholesterol-lowering drugs that mimicked the effects of the PCSK9 mutations. She sits on the board of directors at Pfizer.
Contents
- Jci s conversations with giants in medicine helen hobbs
- Helen hobbs hhmi investigator at ut southwestern wins breakthrough prize
- Education
- Research
- Awards
- References

Helen hobbs hhmi investigator at ut southwestern wins breakthrough prize
Education

Hobbs graduated from Stanford University and went to medical school at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She completed an internship in internal medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she met her future husband who was her resident in the emergency room. Together, Hobbs and her husband, Dr. Dennis Stone, moved to Dallas, Texas in 1982, where she completed her medical training at Parkland Memorial Hospital, including a one-year stint as chief resident.

After residency, she chose to pursue research following the advice of Donald Seldin, the chairman of medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, which is affiliated with Parkland. Hobbs took a research post-doctoral position studying lipoproteins at UT Southwestern in the laboratory of Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein, future Nobel Prize in Medicine winners.
Research

In 1987 Hobbs joined the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center where she is the Dallas Heart Ball Chair in Cardiology Research, Philip O'Bryan Montgomery Jr., M.D., Distinguished Chair in Developmental Biology, and Eugene McDermott Distinguished Chair for the Study of Human Growth and Development. In 1999, she co-founded the Dallas Heart Study with Dr. Jonathan Cohen with a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. This study takes genetic samples of thousands of people, representative of the population of Dallas, and correlates them to the subject's health metrics, and through this study she found that variations in the gene PCSK9 lead to increased protection from cardiovascular disease.
Awards

Passano Award (with Jonathan Cohen) (2016) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2015) Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, Rockefeller University (2015) Pasarow Foundation Award in Cardiovascular Research (2013) International Atherosclerosis Society Prize (2012) American Heart Association Distinguished Scientist Award (2007) National Academy of Sciences, 2007 (2007) American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) Heinrich Wieland Prize (2005) Institute of Medicine (2004) The Association of American Physicians (1997) American Society of Clinical Investigation (1991)