Congratulations to faculty member David Pellman who receives the AACR-G.H.A. Clowes Award for Outstanding Basic Cancer Research.

This award, supported by Loxo@Lilly, is intended to recognize an individual who has made outstanding recent accomplishments in basic cancer research.

Pellman, a Fellow of the AACR Academy, is the Margaret M. Dyson Professor in Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School; investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and associate director for basic science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard Cancer Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He is being recognized for pioneering work identifying mechanisms responsible for the structural and numerical chromosome aberrations in cancer. Through the development of innovative murine models, Pellman demonstrated that whole genome duplication, now known to occur in approximately 40% of human cancers, has the potential to accelerate the somatic evolution of cancer. He also identified a mechanism explaining chromothripsis, a massive form of chromosome rearrangement that is also common in cancer. Using in-house developed methodology to combine long-term, live-cell imaging with single-cell whole genome sequencing, his group has recreated chromothripsis in the laboratory, demonstrating that it can arise from cancer-associated aberrations of the nucleus called micronuclei, thereby contributing to the mechanistic understanding of cancer genome instability.