ECTS Iain T Boyle Award – 2011

Nomination form

Deadline 12 November 2010
2010 Award Announcement

Nominations for the 2011award is now open. The 2011 award will be announced during the 3rd Joint Meeting of the European Calcified Tissue Society and International Bone and Mineral Society 7-11 May 2011 in Athens, Greece
Professor Iain Thomson Boyle (1935-2001) contributed greatly to the field of mineral metabolism and his work on osteoporosis was known and acclaimed nationally and internationally. The award is for €5000 (Euros) and is announced during the Annual ECTS Congress.

Eligibility
This award is open to young scientists who have made significant progress and contribution to the field of bone and calcified tissue. The nominee should be within 10 years of completing their PhD (or equivalent).

Review Procedure
All applications are reviewed by an independent panel of reviewers. The final decision is based on the marks and comments from the reviewers and any conflicts of interest are identified and dealt with appropriately.
Nomination form

2010 Award

The 2010 award was announced during the 37th European Symposium on Calcified Tissues in Glasgow on Sunday 27 June. The award was given to Dr Claire Edwards (Nashville, USA). Many thanks are extended to The Alliance for Better Bone Health (Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals and sanofi-aventis) for supporting this award.

Professor Roland Baron – ECTS President (left), Pascale Atlan, Warner Chilcott - Medical & Technical Affairs Europe  (centre) present the award Dr James Edwards (right) on behalf of Dr Claire Edwards who was unable to attend.

Dr Claire Edwards trained initially in bone and cancer biology at the University of Sheffield with Prof. Peter Croucher and Prof. Mike Rogers. It was during this time that she became the first to uncover the role of bisphosphonates, not only as drugs that impair the progression of the bone disease in myeloma, but also as potential cytotoxic agents for the myeloma cells themselves. During her postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford with Prof. Graham Russell and Prof. Peter Croucher she expanded upon her initial training at Sheffield. While at Oxford, Claire became one of the first to recognize the importance of the bone marrow microenvironment in cancer-induced bone disease, focusing on the RANKL/OPG system, specifically the role of OPG as both a therapeutic approach and a bone marrow-derived survival factor for myeloma cells. In 2004, she relocated to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio to work with my group and establish herself as an independent investigator. During this time she gained extensive first-hand experience with our well-established myeloma model and advanced molecular techniques, which she enthusiastically applied to her ongoing research. In 2006 she moved to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Center for Bone Biology Department of Cancer Biology. During her time in the U.S., she has made considerable advances in the field of myeloma bone disease, with a seminal paper in Blood demonstrating the potential for increasing Wnt signaling as a therapeutic approach in myeloma bone disease, but also raising concerns over the proliferative effects of elevated Wnt signaling in myeloma cells at extra-osseus sites. This striking observation fueled her interest in the bone microenvironment and more specifically, how bone marrow stromal cells and adipokines contribute to bone cell regulation and myeloma bone disease, which has now become the focus of her current research. A major limitation to existing models of cancer-induced bone disease is the requirement of a specific host strain of mouse. This feature restricts the research potential of these models considerably by preventing the molecular examination of the host microenvironment. Work undertaken by Claire has recently resulted in her development of a novel myeloma model that enables the establishment of multiple myeloma and the associated bone disease in genetically modified mice. This model is a major advance for research into myeloma bone disease. In addition to these findings, she has forged international multi-disciplinary collaborations, allowing her to pursue new, innovative approaches to the analysis of normal skeletal biology and cancer-induced bone disease through the use of mathematical modeling, novel cell culture systems and human patient samples.

Previous awards

2009 Awards

Dr Morten Asser Karsdal achieved his master of biotechnical engineering at the “Technical University of Denmark” in 1998. He achieved his PhD at the “Technical University of Southern Denmark” 2004, with special focus on the cell and molecular biology of bone. Dr Karsdal is presently the Head of Pharmacology at Nordic Bioscience, and has previously had various research positions at smaller biotech companies in Denmark. He has more than 55 peer reviewed publications within the bone and cartilage field. Dr Karsdal is presently involved in investigating a potential anabolic signaling from osteoclasts to osteoblasts and the role of the chloride channel ClC-7 in osteoclasts. Another of his main interests is the interaction between bone and cartilage in the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis. Lastly, development of new biological models and biochemical assays for understanding of the disease and to monitor and identify potential treatments for bone and cartilage pathologies are major areas of interest.

Dr Cristina Sobbachi started her research working on primary immunodeficiencies, contributing to several papers on Omenn syndrome and RAG-dependent diseases. Soon she became interested in the genetics of osteopetrosis, co-authoring a manuscript reporting the isolation of the first gene TCIRG1 responsible for human autosomal recessive osteopetrosis ARO. From then on, she became deeply involved in the characterization of this severe disease and her 2001 paper on TCIRG1-dependent ARO is frequently cited as a reference paper for the molecular analysis of this disease. In spite of two one-year maternal leaves, she was able to actively pursue this field and to contribute to several papers on the characterization of the heterogeneity of this disease, including a 2003 paper on the various forms of ClCN7 pathologies, and to an interesting paper on in utero hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, a strategy that has proved able to rescue the severe phenotype in the experimental animal. Finally, she hypothesised the existence of the osteoclast-poor form of ARO and contributed as a main author to the first paper demonstrating RANKL mutations in human ARO. This paper was followed by the recent demonstration of a second form of osteoclast-poor ARO due to RANK. She is currently pursuing novel approaches for the treatment of RANKL-dependent ARO by soluble RANKL administration in a rankl knockout mouse model in collaboration with AMGEN, the company which produces this cytokine

2008 Award

Dr Rutger van Bezooijen was selected as the sixth recipient of the ECTS/Alliance for Better Bone Health Iain T Boyle award, which was presented during the 35th European Symposium on Calcified Tissues in Barcelona on 27 May 2008. Dr Bezooijen is based at the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and his current interest is focused on characterization of the mechanism by which sclerostin affects Wnt signaling, the regulation of sclerostin expression, and detailed clinical analysis of patients with sclerosteosis and van Buchem disease.

2007 Award

Dr Uwe Kornak was selected as the fifth recipient of the ECTS/Alliance for Better Bone Health Iain T Boyle award, which was presented during the 34th European Symposium on Calcified Tissues in Copenhagen on 8 May 2007. Uwe Kornak is based at the Institute for Medical Genetics in Berlin, Germany and his main interests are the regulation of bone density and NFI and bone. His main focus in the past has been the pathogenesis of recessive and dominant forms of osteopetrosis, which turned out to be caused by defects in intracellular acidification mechanisms. He has subsequently become involved with developmental aspects of skeletogenesis and the role of different transcription factors like Hoxd13, Runx2 and Mef2c. Recently, the scope of his interests was further broadened by investigations on Golgi function in bone homestasis.

2006 Award

Dr Florent Elefteriou was selected as the fourth recipient of the Alliance for Better Bone Health Iain T Boyle award.

Dr Elefteriou was trained in biochemistry and genetics in Claude-Bernard University (France) and then Baylor College of Medicine (USA) and is leading since 2005 his own research group at UT-Health Science Center of San Antonio. His major scientific contribution to the bone field has been to uncover the role of the central and peripheral nervous systems in the regulation of bone remodeling.

His seminal work has demonstrated that hypothalamic neurons responsive to the adipocyte-derived hormone leptin inhibits bone formation and favor bone resorption via the sympathetic nervous system and b2-adrenergic receptors expressed by osteoblasts. He has also identified using number of mutant mouse models the neuropeptide CART and the melanocortin 4 receptor as additional and possible central molecules involved in bone mass homeostasis.

His current research focuses on b2-adrenergic signaling in osteoblats and on the characterization of the molecular mechanisms causing the skeletal defects observed in Neurofibromatosis.

2005 Award

Dr Tjeerd van Staa was selected as the third recipient of the Alliance for Better Bone Health (Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals and Sanofi-Aventis) award. Dr van Staa has made major contributions to the epidemiology of osteoporosis, with particular regard to glucocorticoid-induced bone loss.  His seminal work has demonstrated that fracture risk in glucocorticoid treated patients rises steeply soon after commencement of therapy; attenuates rapidly after cessation of therapy; and occurs at prednisolone doses less than those conventionally associated with osteoporosis.  His scholarly contributions have had a major input upon clinical practice and have been highly cited in the peer reviewed literature.  He continues to hold academic positions at the MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre, University of Southampton and Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

2004 Award

Wim Van Hul was selected as the second recipient of the prestigious Alliance for Better Bone Health Iain T. Boyle award.  He is a researcher trained in molecular biology and genetics who started, after his PhD studies on the genetics of Alzheimer's disease, his own research team at the Department of Medical Genetics at the University and University Hospital in Antwerp, Belgium. In the last decennium, his team has been very successful in identifying and characterizing genes underlying, mainly monogenic, genetic conditions associated with an abnormal bone homeostasis.  These include the SOST gene underlying Van Buchem disease and sclerosteosis, the role of TGFbeta-1 in Camurati-Engelmann disease, the chloride channel ClCN7 in autosomal dominant osteopetrosis, LRP5 in different sclerosing bone dysplasias as well as the involvement of Msx2 and Alx4 in ossification defects of the skull. He is currently coauthor of about 80 publications, many of them in journals of high impact.

2003 Award

Michael Rogers is an outstanding young scientist and is a worthy recipient of this prestigious award. His major scientific achievement has been to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of action of bisphosphonate drugs. He and his group are at the forefront of this research and have clearly shown that bisphosphonates act on osteoclasts by two distinct mechanisms. Simple bisphosphonates become incorporated into toxic ATP analogues that induce osteoclast apoptosis, whereas the more potent nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates prevent prenylation of small GTPase signalling proteins by inhibiting the enzyme FPP synthase. He started this research on bisphosphonates during his PhD studies in 1989 and over the following decade has produced a very impressive number of publications.

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