From the November 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
SNMMI
Paul C. Aebersold Award
The Paul C. Aebersold Award is named after a pioneer in the biologic and medical application of radioactive materials and the first director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Isotope Development. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in basic science applied to nuclear medicine and was first presented in 1973. The SNMMI Committee on Awards selects the recipient.
Martin G. Pomper, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging and professor in the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Upon assuming leadership of the division of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging in 2015 Pomper became the Henry N. Wagner, Jr. Professor of Radiology. Previously he was the inaugural William R. Brody Professor, which is a Johns Hopkins professorship designated for a radiologist physician-scientist who excels in translational innovation in imaging. He oversees a coalition of molecular imaging researchers at Johns Hopkins through several federally funded programs, and he co-directs the Kimmel Cancer Center's Cancer Molecular and Functional Imaging Program and the Cancer Functional Imaging Core. He has contributed to several Johns Hopkins start-up companies in an effort to disseminate laboratory-based discoveries.
His team has performed pioneering work in discovery and translation of low-molecular-weight imaging agents targeting the prostate-specific membrane antigen. Such compounds are being used worldwide in the management of prostate cancer. Other projects focus on development of radiopharmaceuticals for PET and SPECT for a variety of indications, including other cancers, inflammation, immunity and central nervous system disorders. His team has also developed a general technique for molecular-genetic imaging and therapy of cancer, among other contributions.
Pomper received his undergraduate, graduate (organic chemistry) and medical degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His postgraduate medical training was at Johns Hopkins and included an internship on the Osler Medical Service, residencies in diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine and a fellowship in neuroradiology. He is board certified in diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine and has been on the faculty at Johns Hopkins since 1995. Pomper is a past president of SNMMI’s Center for Molecular Imaging Innovation and Translation and former editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Imaging.
Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award
Each year, SNMMI presents the Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award to an individual for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear medicine. De Hevesy received the 1943 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in determining the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination of radioactive compounds in the human body. His work led to the foundation of nuclear medicine as a tool for diagnosis and therapy, and he is considered to be one of the fathers of nuclear medicine. SNMMI has given the de Hevesy Award every year since 1960 to honor groundbreaking discoveries and inventions in the field of nuclear medicine.
Joanna S. Fowler, Ph.D., is senior chemist emeritus of the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York; special volunteer at the National Institutes of Health; emeritus professor in the Department of Chemistry, Stony Brook University; and adjunct professor in the Psychiatry Department, Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Fowler has made significant contributions to brain research. Beginning in the 1970s, together with other researchers, she developed the radiotracer F-18-FDG to measure brain glucose metabolism noninvasively in humans. It has since become the most widely used radiotracer in basic research and clinical settings and has facilitated tremendous advances in the study of the human brain and in malignant tumor detection. At the 2016 SNMMI annual meeting, she delivered the Henry N. Wagner, Jr., Lecture on “Working Against Time: Designing and Synthesizing FDG for the First Human Studies in 1976,” which discussed the historical development of the radiotracer more than 40 years ago.
Fowler’s research interests center on radiotracer chemistry, focusing on using PET to image drug pharmacokinetics and the brain circuits which are disrupted in drug addiction. Her early studies included imaging the uptake and movement of cocaine in the human brain, which sheds light on why this drug is so powerfully reinforcing and addictive, as well as the observation that smokers have reduced levels of monoamine oxidase (MAO), an enzyme which breaks down dopamine—the neurotransmitter that mediates reward, motivation and movement. Her most recent work is on developing methods to understand the relationship between genes, brain chemistry and behavior, and on using PET to facilitate the introduction of new drugs into the practice of medicine.
Fowler received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Colorado and did her postdoctoral work at the University of East Anglia in England and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. She has more than 350 peer-reviewed publications to her credit and has received numerous awards, including: the Paul Aebersold Award from SNMMI (1997); the E. O. Lawrence Award in Life Sciences from the U.S. Department of Energy (1999); and the Garvan-Olin Award and the Glen T. Seaborg Award from the American Chemical Society (1999 and 2002). She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and is a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences and the National Medal of Science (both in 2009). Fowler also received the IUPAC Distinguished Women in Chemistry Award (2011) and the Carothers Award from the Delaware Section of the American Chemical Society (2016). She holds eight patents for radiolabeling procedures.
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