Scheele Award Laureate Hailed by World Authorities in Stockholm

On 16 November in Stockholm, many world-class scientists will participate in the Scheele Symposium in honor of Charles L. Sawyers, the 2017 recipient of the prestigious Scheele Award. The prize will be handed over by Helene Hellmark Knutsson, the Swedish Minister of Higher Education and Research. The symposium program offers lectures on cancer research, resistance issues, and targeted treatments.

Douglas Hanahan is delivering one of the symposium lectures. He is a molecular oncology pioneer and author of The Hallmarks of cancer – a milestone article on tumor cell research, which is cited in more than 25,000 peer-reviewed articles. Professor Hanahan is the director of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne and is famous for his long-standing partnership with the late legendary Judah Folkman. Their efforts led to leading-edge insights into angiogenesis. Sawyers is a professor at the prestigious Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. His major accomplishments have been in chronic myeloid leukemia and prostate cancer. In both fields, he has taken on the challenge of finding out what happens when drug-resistance arises – and how to overcome the problem. Besides Sawyers and Hanahan, symposium speakers include: • Mireille Cantarini, long-standing senior medical director at AstraZeneca in the UK, currently at Sandigrey Clinical Ltd. • Lars Bullinger, University of Ulm, Germany • Henrik Grönberg, Karolinska Institutet (see article in Pharma Industry, where Henrik Grönberg comments on Sawyer's cutting-edge efforts in cancer drug development: Unik läkemedelsbragd ger Apotekarsocietetens Scheele-pris) • Bertrand Tombal, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc/Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium • Karim Fizazi, Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France Every two years, Sweden’s Pharmaceutical Society grants the Scheele Award to “a particularly prominent, internationally recognized pharmaceutical scientist” to spotlight significant contributions to drug research and development. In conjunction with the award ceremony, the Scheele Symposium is held with the purpose to develop and maintain scientific networks.