Grantee Lee Wins 2016 FNIH Lurie Prize

NIDA grantee Dr. Jeannie Lee has been named the 2016 winner of the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences.

Dr. Jeannie T. Lee, a NIDA grantee, has been named the 2016 winner of the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences for uncovering the functions of long, noncoding RNA in epigenetic regulation. Her work has accelerated the understanding of mechanisms driving epigenetic regulation, which involves changes in gene function without changing the DNA sequence. 

Lee’s work investigates how a whole sex chromosome can be shut down and how “X-chromosome inactivation” can be leveraged to treat congenital diseases such as Rett, CDKL5 and Fragile X syndromes in addition to numerous cancers such as breast, ovarian, blood, intestinal and male germ cell tumors where there is often an extra x- chromosomal copy. 

The Lurie Prize, administered by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, will be presented on May 18 in Washington, D.C. 

Lee is a professor of genetics and pathology at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.