Erkki Ruoslahti
Erkki Ruoslahti ( born February 16, 1940 in Puumala, Finland ) is a Finnish- American cell biologist and cancer researcher at the Sanford- Burnham Medical Research Institute and the University of California, San Diego.
Life
Ruoslahti earned at the University of Helsinki in 1961 a Bachelor in Medicine, 1965, MD and 1967, a Ph.D. in immunology. In 1968 he went as a guest researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ). In 1970 he became Professor of serology and bacteriology at the University of Helsinki and 1975 for the same combination of subjects at the University of Turku. 1976 went Ruoslahti as Research Group Leader ( Senior Research Scientist ) and later head of the Department of Immunology at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. In 1979 he moved to the Sanford- Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where he held various management positions, including from 1989 to 2001 as President and CEO. Since 1980 Ruoslahti is also a professor at the University of California, San Diego held, first in the Department of Pathology, in the last of Bioengineering.
Work
Ruoslahti is considered a leader in the field of cell adhesion molecules. He discovered that the cell -binding domain of several key proteins of the extracellular matrix of the simple RGD sequence is. Ruoslahti showed that the endothelial cells of various organs expressing unique receptors, thus allowing targeting of normal organs or certain tumors.