The Louis-Jeantet Foundation awards Luigi Naldini, Full Professor Ordinary at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and Director of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan (SR-Tiget) the 2019 Louis-Jeantet Prize for his pioneering research activity, which brought gene therapy from the experimental context to the first clinical applications, thanks to which patients with different genetic diseases have already been treated.
Since it was launched in 1986 until today, the Louis-Jeantet Awards have been awarded 90 internationally renowned researchers, 12 of which have subsequently received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, or the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Together with Luigi Naldini, Botond Roska was awarded as well, one of the founding directors of the Institute of Clinical and Molecular Ophthalmology in Basel (IOB), for the discovery of the basic principles of visual information processing and the development of therapeutic strategies for the treatment of retinal defects.
Over the last twenty years Prof. Naldini has been a pivotal figure in the development and application of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer. Besides being among the most used tools in the field of biomedical research, these are showing safety and efficacy in clinical trials for the treatment of serious genetic diseases and for some types of cancer; recently this strategy has also been extended to the treatment of thalassemia.
The awards ceremony will be held on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland.
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