Nobel laureate Drew Weissman will present the first Senior Vice Chancellor Laureate Lecture of the year on March 25, 2025. Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, will present “Nucleoside Modified mRNA-LNP Therapeutics.”
Weissman and Katalin Karikó, adjunct professor of neurosurgery at Penn, won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their breakthrough work on mRNA treatments. The platform his lab created was used in both the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines and launched a new era of vaccine and therapeutic development.
He is now expanding on that work with Pitt researchers as coleader of the Center for Transcriptional Medicine, which brings together 40 leading clinicians and basic scientists working to treat end-stage organ disease. In addition to experts from Pitt and Penn, the center draws from institutions including the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard and Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, to catalyze the generation of a novel approach to reprogram chronically injured tissues and organs.
They aim to apply mRNA treatments to areas including decompensated end-stage liver disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic heart disease and a variety of protein therapeutics delivered with mRNA lipid nanoparticles.
Weissman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biochemistry and enzymology from Brandeis University in 1981 and his MD and PhD in immunology and microbiology in 1987 at Boston University School of Medicine. Following a residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, he completed a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.
This event is part of the Senior Vice Chancellor Laureate Lectures, a revival of Pitt’s former series featuring some of the world’s top-tier scientists engaged in the most significant and dynamic biomedical research currently underway.
Weissman’s lecture will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25 in BST S100A.
In-person attendance is encouraged but a virtual option is available on Zoom at https://pitt.zoom.us/j/99207290357.