Professor Michael A. Gimbrone Jr.

Michael Gimbrone Jr. received his B.A. in Zoology from Cornell University and M.D. from Harvard Medical School. After completing an Internship in Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a Research Fellowship at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, he joined the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He then pursued residency training in Pathology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston in 1974. He joined Harvard Medical School in 1975 and is currently the Elsie T. Friedman Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Excellence in Vascular Biology and Chairman of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Professor Gimbrone’s outstanding contributions to the field of vascular biology, particularly the biology of vascular inflammation, have established the conceptual framework for understanding the mechanistic role of the endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system in diseases such as atherosclerosis and its complications– heart attack and stroke. He pioneered the growth of human vascular endothelial cells in vitro and was the first to show that endothelial cells produce prostaglandins and other mediators that influence the function of blood platelets and leukocytes. He also established the paradigm of endothelial activation by pro-inflammatory cytokines and discovered inducible endothelial-leukocyte adhesion molecules that are important in inflammation and atherogenesis. His laboratory also identified the first biomechanically activated “shear stress-response element” in the promoter of a human gene, and applied high-throughput genomic analyses to identify “atheroprotective genes” that appear to confer resistance to pro-inflammatory stimuli and the development of atherosclerotic lesions in the cardiovascular system. These seminal studies point the way to new methods for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of vascular disease.

Gimbrone’s studies appeared in more than 250 publications, reviews and book chapters. He received many other prizes including: the Warner Lambert/Parke Davis Award in Experimental Pathology, the American Heart Association Basic Research Prize, the MERIT Award from the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the Pasarow Foundation Award in Cardiovascular Disease, the J. Allyn Taylor International Prize in Medicine, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cardiovascular Research.

Professor Gimbrone Jr. has an impressive list of visiting professorships and lectureships in the U.S.A., Europe and Japan, memberships of editorial boards of leading medical journals, and election to prestigious institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a past President of the American Society for Investigative Pathology and founding President of the North American Vascular Biology Organization.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.