Kliewer awarded prestigious Windaus Prize
By Deborah Wormser
Dr. Steven Kliewer, Professor of Molecular Biology and of Pharmacology, recently became the third faculty member from UT Southwestern Medical Center to be honored with the Adolf Windaus Prize for Bile Acid Research.
The Falk Foundation’s award – given every two years since 1980, and bearing the name of the 1928 Nobel Laureate in chemistry – was
presented to Dr. Kliewer at the XXIII International Bile Acid Meeting in Freiburg, Germany, on Oct. 8, 2014.
Dr. David Mangelsdorf, Chairman of Pharmacology at UT Southwestern who runs a joint laboratory with Dr. Kliewer, was recognized with the award in 2000 and Dr. David Russell, Vice Provost and Dean of Basic Research, received the honor in 2002. The prize includes a monetary award.
“I’m very pleased and honored to win the Windaus Prize,” Dr. Kliewer said. “I would like to thank David Mangelsdorf and all my other colleagues whose support led up to this award. It’s fantastic to work at UT Southwestern, where I’m surrounded by the world’s leading researchers in cholesterol and bile acid metabolism.”
Dr. Mangelsdorf said, “Steve is the consummate scientist - I'd compare his personality and genius as being somewhere between a cross of Leonard and Sheldon on ‘The Big Bang Theory’ (the popular television comedy about scientists). However, what really sets him apart as a top-notch researcher has been his creativity and fearless approach to a scientific problem.
“Before we recruited Steve here in 2002, he and I were actually competitors on the discovery of the long sought-after mechanism of how the body regulates the catabolism of cholesterol into bile acids. It was for these discoveries that we each received the Windaus Prize: mine for the discovery of the bile acid receptor and its downstream targets in the liver, and Steve for the discovery of a hormone secreted by the gut – FGF19 – to regulate bile acid metabolism in the liver. Steve’s finding was the missing link in the feedback loop by which bile acids regulate their own synthesis.”
In addition to explaining a mechanism that eluded the field for decades, the Mangelsdorf-Kliewer team’s research has provided two intriguing therapeutic targets (the bile acid receptor and FGF19), which are now clinical candidates for gastroenterological disorders, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Dr. Mangelsdorf added.
Dr. Kliewer majored in biochemistry at Brown University before earning his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Ronald Evans at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and in 1993 joined GlaxoSmithKline, Inc. in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where he founded a scientific group devoted to exploiting orphan nuclear receptors as drug discovery targets.
###
Dr. Kliewer holds the Nancy and Jake L. Hamon Distinguished Chair in Basic Cancer Research.
Dr. Mangelsdorf holds the Alfred G. Gilman Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology, and the Raymond and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Molecular Neuropharmacology in Honor of Harold B. Crasilneck, Ph.D.
Dr. Russell holds the Eugene McDermott Distinguished Chair in Molecular Genetics.
