Dr. Don Cleveland has made field leading contributions in cancer genetics and neurosciences. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California at San Diego, as well as a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy’s Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A recipient of three NIH Merit Awards, he has also won the Wings Over Wall Street MDA Outstanding Scientist award and The Sheila Essey Prize from the ALS Association and American Academy of Neurology and the Judd award from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Cleveland initially identified tau, the protein which accumulates aberrantly in Alzheimer’s disease and which is the protein whose misfolding underlies chronic traumatic brain injury (now receiving international attention from its impact in athletics, especially American football). He uncovered the mechanisms underlying the major genetic forms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and demonstrated that disease involves neurons and their non-neuronal neighbors. He has developed gene silencing therapy for neurodegenerative diseases using designer DNA “antisense oligonucleotide (ASO)” drugs. Clinical trials with these ASOs have been initiated for multiple neurodegenerative diseases, including for ALS and Huntington’s diseases.