SPEAKER'S PROFILES
Inder Verma
Inder M. Verma is a professor in the Laboratory of Genetics and holds the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Science and American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology. He received his PhD degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel in 1971, completed postdoctoral training with David Baltimore at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, and has been with the Salk Institute as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and now Professor from 1974 to present. Dr. Verma is one of the world's leading authorities on the development of viruses for gene therapy vectors and uses genetically engineered viruses to insert new genes into cells that can then be returned to the body, where they produce the essential protein whose absence causes disease. Dr. Verma and Salk colleagues developed a gene therapy vector, based on a stripped-down version of HIV that can deliver genes to nondividing cells, which constitute the majority of the cells in our bodies. They have used this vector successfully to deliver the clotting factor gene to laboratory animals and to transfer a therapeutic gene to retinal cells to mice with an inborn deficiency. Dr. Verma's group is also studying two genes implicated in familial breast cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, and recently demonstrated that their action is linked to the cell's division cycle and that BRCA1 regulates gene activity. Dr. Verma’s scientific contributions have been recognized by a number of honors, including one of 25 lifetime American Cancer Society Professorships (1990), an Outstanding Investigator Award from the NIH (1988), membership in the Third World Academy of Sciences (1995), the National Academy of Sciences, India (1997), the National Academy of Sciences, USA (1997), the Institute of Medicine (1999), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, EMBO (1998) and election to the American Philosophical Society (2006) Vilcek Foundation Prize (2008), ASGT Outstanding Achievement Award (2009) Spector Prize (2010), and the Pasarow Award in Cancer Research (2010).
