For Immediate Release
April 14, 2009

BUFFALO, NY – Roger Tsien, PhD, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing a rainbow of proteins that shine as they do their work within a cell, is now focusing his efforts on cancer.

Dr. Tsien will present the annual Dave Memorial Lecture on Thursday, April 23, 9 am, in the David C. Hohn, MD, Lecture Hall, Research Studies Center, Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI).

Dr. Tsien’s presentation, “Optical and MR Imaging of Tumors in vivo with Activatable Cell-Penetrating Peptides,” is free and open to the public.

Dr. Tsien, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie, developed green fluorescent protein markers to visualize proteins in action. This allows scientists to tag any of the tens of thousands of proteins at work in the body to observe what they do and how they interact. The discovery has been called one of the most important tools in contemporary bioscience.

Dr. Tsien and colleagues are now loading tumors with synthetic nanoparticles that glow on the operating table, making the edge of the tumor visible during surgery. The technology holds promise as a way to detect tumors and improve the success of cancer surgery.

Dr. Tsien is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Pharmacology at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine, and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California at San Diego.

The annual Dave Memorial Lecture was established to honor the late Chandrakant V. Dave, PhD, a research scientist in the Department of Pharmacology at RPCI, and is organized by graduate students in the Molecular Pharmacology and Cancer Therapeutics Department.

Roswell Park Cancer Institute, founded in 1898, is the nation’s first cancer research, treatment and education center and is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Upstate New York. RPCI is a member of the prestigious National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of the nation’s leading cancer centers. Roswell Park has affiliate sites and collaborative programs both nationally and internationally. For more information, visit RPCI’s website at www.roswellpark.org, call 1-877-ASK-RPCI (1-877-275-7724) or e-mail askrpci@roswellpark.org.

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