Medicinal Chemistry graduate student wins $325,000 fellowship

Steven Kazmirski

Steven Kazmirski, graduate student in the School of Pharmacy’s Department of Medicinal Chemistry, has been awarded a Hitchings-Elion Fellowship from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The fellowship, worth $325,000 over five years, provides funds for two years of postdoctoral work in the United Kingdom, a year of postdoctoral work back in the United States, and two years as a faculty member in the United States or Canada. Five of the fellowships were awarded nationwide this year.

Kazmirski expects to receive his Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry this winter and plans to begin work in the laboratory of Professor Alan Fersht at the University of Cambridge in England this spring. He will be working on the folding pathway of the protein p53, which is induced in cells with damaged DNA and causes these cells to die or stop dividing.

The segment of p53 he is concentrating on, called the oligomerization domain, is considered a likely site for protein engineering, along with the DNA-binding domain, when p53 fails. Failure of p53 in DNA-damaged cells is believed to be a basic cause of cancer development. Prospects for eventual gene therapy applied to p53 are many years away and dependent on the kind of basic research on the protein that Kazmirski plans to conduct.

He has been working on protein folding, primarily using computer simulation, for his Ph.D. dissertation research with Dr. Valerie Daggett, associate professor of medicinal chemistry. Daggett assisted him in setting up the opportunity to work in Fersht’s laboratory at Cambridge.

The fellowships are named for two of the scientists who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—the late Dr. George Hitchings, a graduate of the UW, and Dr. Gertrude Elion. Elion continues as a member of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Board of Directors. The Fund is an independent private foundation established to advance the medical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities.

The Hitchings-Elion Fellowships are intended to help promising researchers in the biomedical sciences make the transition to becoming independent investigators and to promote collaboration among scientists in the countries involved. ¶

Claire Dietz