OCTOBER 22, 2024, NEW YORK – Ludwig Cancer Research congratulates Ludwig Harvard’s Marcia Haigis and David Pellman and Ludwig MIT’s Matthew Vander Heiden on their election to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM). They join a class of 90 regular and ten international members inducted into the Academy this year. Among the highest of honors bestowed to professionals in the fields of health and medicine, election to the NAM recognizes individuals who the Academy sees as having “demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.”
Haigis and Vander Heiden were both cited by the NAM for their pioneering studies of cellular metabolism. Haigis was especially recognized for “elucidating how metabolites contribute to normal physiology, aging, cancer, and anti-tumor immune control.” Her discoveries, the Academy observed, have “informed how diet and age alter metabolite interactions, leading to disease.” Vander Heiden was specifically honored for his studies exploring “how [cell metabolism] influences cancer initiation, progression, and therapy responses.” The NAM also noted that Vander Heiden’s “work has contributed to the development of approved therapies for cancer and anemia,” and that he is a “thought leader in understanding metabolic phenotypes and their relations to disease pathogenesis.”
Pellman, meanwhile, was honored “for identifying the mechanistic basis for mutational processes that generate a large fraction of the structural and numerical chromosome abnormalities in cancer and certain congenital diseases.” The NAM also noted that “his discovery of a mechanism explaining chromothripsis is considered a landmark in cancer genetics.”