Dr. Joseph Schlessinger is the present chair of the dept. of Pharmacology at Yale University, one of the best universities in the US. Before that he acted as the chair of the department of Pharmacology at NYU (New York University) and the director of the NYU Skirball research facility.

Prof. Schlessinger is regarded as the ‘father’ of Signal Transduction, an area of investigation integral for cancer research (and other fields). This research has already resulted in him winning numerous awards, including the esteemed Dan David award (in 2006), and has led to the development of multiple drugs for treating several types of cancers.

PubMed, the premier resource for academic publications lists 450 publications for Dr. Schlessinger. In 2003, the UK newspaper The Guardian crafted a list of the greatest scientists of our times, or the “Giants of Science”, and placed Schlessinger at #14, a great honor.

In addition to his academic work, Dr. Schlessinger is involved with and starts biotechnology companies. His first company, which he co-founded with Dr. Axel Ullrich) was called Sugen, and created a drug by the name of Sutent for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma and gastrointestinal stromal tumor. This drug was approved by the FDA in 2006 in less than 6 months and is the first time that the FDA has made an exception and had approved a new drug for two separate conditions concurrently. The drug was so successful it was considered unethical to deny it from sick patients.

Later on Dr. Schlessinger co-founded Plexxikon, a company which attempts, by using state of the art ways, to rapidly create numerous types of drugs for treating multiple diseases.

It is our hope that Dr. Schlessinger continues doing this prolific research, as we all may gain from it one day, it gives hope to ill people, and cam be said to make the world a healthier place.