People : Shea Foundation Recognizes Engvall For Developing Enzyme-linked Assays, Biopharmaceutics Researcher Receives Inaugural Award From FIP; Obituary

Shea Foundation Recognizes Engvall For Developing Enzyme-linked Assays Biopharmaceutics Researcher Receives Inaugural Award From FIP James B. Pollack, Obituary Date: July 25, 1994, pp.22 Eva Engvall, a senior staff scientist at the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation in California, received an award for scientific achievement from the Edmund and Mary Shea Family Foundation of Walnut, Calif., on July 7 for her invention of the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The $25,000 prize was presented to her at a special ceremony chaired by George E. Palade, a 1974 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine. The Shea Foundation, run by Edmund Shea, executive vice president and director of the J.F. Shea Co. of Walnut--a civil construction company and venture capital firm in the area of medicine--is interested in innovations in the biomedical field. "My major contribution was in making the technique accessible," says Engvall, who worked on developing the ELISA test as part of her doctorate in immunology in the early 1970s in the laboratory of Peter Perl-mann at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. "It was actually Professor Perlmann who had the idea." The idea was to conjugate, or attach, enzymes to antibodies so as to enhance antibody detectability. At the time, the most common immunological assay, radioimmunoassay (RIA), used radioactive markers. ELISAs had several advantages over RIAs--they were not only safer (because they eliminated the need for radioactive material) but also cheaper and more stable. "One of my first activities after finishing my Ph.D. was to go on a safari in Africa and try using the test in harsher field conditions. It was successful," says the 54-year-old immunologist. Her seminal paper on the development of the technique-- "Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, ELISA III. Quantitation of specific antibodies by enzyme-labeled anti-immunoglobulin in antigen-coated tubes," Journal of Immunology, 109:129-5, 1972--had been referenced in more than 1,500 subsequent articles by 1987 and hence was identified as a "Citation Classic" by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information. Nowadays ELISA is widely used, with applications in several fields, including pregnancy tests and diagnosis of viral, bacterial, and fungal diseases. Engvall, who now works with cellular matrix proteins, still uses the assay in her research. Gerhard Levy, a distinguished professor of pharmacy at the State University of New York, Buffalo, will receive the inaugural International Pharmaceutical Federation's (FIP) Lifetime Achievement Award during the opening ceremony of FIP's World Pharmacy Congress, to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, on September 5. Headquartered in the Hague, the Netherlands, FIP is an international professional society for both research scientists and professional pharmacists. Levy's prime research interests over the years have been in the areas of pharmacokinetics and dynamics--namely, studying the time course of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of drugs in the body, as well as the relationship between the concentration of drugs to the intensity of their pharmacologic effects. He is also known for his pioneering work in the field of biopharmaceutics. "I coined the term [biopharma-ceutics] to describe my work-- and [that] of other people--which looked at the effects of the pharmaceutical dosage form on the therapeutic efficacy of [drug] dosage," says Levy. With his students in the early 1960s, he developed a dissolution procedure that is now a standard quality-control test used by both industrial and federal laboratories to safeguard the absorption of the medicinal agents in tablets and capsules. The FIP Foundation for Education and Research established the lifetime achievement award last year to reward lasting contributions to the field of pharmaceutics. Levy, 66, who received a doctorate in 1958 from the University of California, San Francisco, intends to donate the prize money, 2,000 Dutch guilders ($1,150), to the Buffalo Pharmaceutics Scholar Fund, which rewards outstanding graduate students in the department of pharmaceutics at SUNY-Buffalo, where he has served on the faculty since 1958. Planetary scientist James B. Pollack, a senior research scientist in the space science division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., died June 13 of cancer at his home in San Jose. He was 55 years old. Pollack was credited with numerous fundamental discoveries in planetary science, especially in the area of planetary atmospheres. Foremost among them was his study of the effects on Earth's temperature and surface biology of floating debris caused by an asteroid that hit the planet 65 million years ago. The insulating action of the debris is believed to have led to a cooling that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Pollack's investigations were the basis for research into the theory of "nuclear winter," a term coined by Pollack and four colleagues to describe a similarly disastrous atmospheric condition they hypothesized would result from the explosion of nuclear arms. Their controversial 1983 paper on the subject (R.P. Turco et al., "Nuclear winter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions," Science, 222:1283-92) had been referred to in more than 250 subsequent articles as of last May. Pollack, who received a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 1965 and began working at Ames in 1970, played a key role in almost every major planetary spacecraft mission since the Apollo series, including Viking and Voyager, according to NASA.

People : Shea Foundation Recognizes Engvall For Developing Enzyme-linked Assays, Biopharmaceutics Researcher Receives Inaugural Award From FIP; Obituary

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