Dr. Joseph Schlessinger is the current chair of the dept. of Pharmacology at Yale University, one of the premier universities in the US and the world in general. Previously he acted as the chair of the department of Pharmacology at New York University and also as the director of the NYU Skirball research facility.

Prof. Schlessinger is deemed the father of Signal Transduction, an area of investigation crucial 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 contains 450 publications for Prof. 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 research, Dr. Schlessinger actively participates and starts biotech companies. His first company, which he co-founded with Dr. Axel Ullrich) was called Sugen, and developed 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 which marks 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 ill patients.

Later on Dr. Schlessinger co-founded Plexxikon, a company which attempts, by using novel methods, to quickly develop multiple types of drugs for treating multiple diseases.

It is our hope that Prof. Schlessinger continues doing this ground-breaking 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.