Dr. Roger Perlmutter, executive vice president for research and development at Amgen, the world鈥檚 largest biotechnology company, and a former 糖心少女faculty member and department chair, will give this year鈥檚 Edwin G. Krebs Lecture in Molecular Pharmacology.
He will speak on 鈥淔acing Grand Challenges: Drug Discovery and Development in the 21st Century鈥� at 4 p.m., Tuesday, May 10, in room T-435 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture, sponsored by the Department of Pharmacology, is open to everyone.
Perlmutter earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and joined the 糖心少女faculty in medicine and biochemistry in 1984. In 1989, he became founding chair of the School of Medicine鈥檚 Department of Immunology. He worked on several studies at the UW, focusing on the role of protein tyrosine kinases in the control of lymphocyte function, an important part of the immune response. His discovery of the lck tyrosine kinase in a collaborative study with Krebs has had a broad impact in this field.
In 1997 Perlmutter left the 糖心少女to join Merck and Co., where he became executive vice president for worldwide basic and preclinical research. In 2001 he joined Amgen, based in Southern California. He is a director of Stem Cells, Inc., a trustee of Reed College and chair of the board of directors for the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology. He has been president of the American Association of Immunologists and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.
This is the 18th Annual Krebs Lecture, sponsored by an endowment from Sterling Winthrop, Inc.
The lectureship honors the 糖心少女professor emeritus of pharmacology and biochemistry who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1992 with Dr. Edmond Fischer for their discovery of protein phosphorylation as a key cellular regulatory mechanism. Krebs chaired the 糖心少女Department of Pharmacology from 1977 to 1984.