Jan Breslow

Jan Leslie Breslow (born 1943)

In 1973, he took up a post as head of the metabolism division of Boston Children's Hospital, as well as successively instructor, assistant and associate professor in pediatric medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 1984, he moved to Rockefeller University as a professor, and in 1986, was appointed Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professor at the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism. and in the early 1980s, with Vassilis Zannis, he was one of the earliest to dissect the different variants of human apolipoprotein E (ApoE), a component of very low-density lipoprotein. People with different ApoE variants are now known to have different risks not only of heart disease but also of Alzheimer's disease. Nobuyo Maeda's group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also independently created ApoE knockouts (apoe−/−) that developed atherosclerosis at the same time. The ApoE knockout was the earliest mouse model of the disease, and has been widely used in atherosclerosis research.

His group has subsequently researched other genes associated with atherosclerosis, and for example, in 2003, were among the first to identify and characterize PCSK9, which encodes an enzyme acting in a novel cholesterol regulatory pathway. Antibodies targeting PCSK9 were approved by the US FDA as a novel class of cholesterol-lowering drugs in 2015.

Awards and honours Breslow is an elected fellow of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (1984), US National Academy of Sciences (1995), Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (1996) and the Institute of Medicine (1997). – and has received several awards from the association, including their Lifetime Research Achievement Award in 2010. In March 2013, Rockefeller University organized a symposium entitled "Genetics of Lipid Disorders and Atherosclerosis" to mark his seventieth birthday.

Personal life Breslow is married to Marilyn G. Breslow, an investment manager and sculptor; the couple have two sons. Breslow is one of the signatories of a letter entitled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming", which was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2012.

Selected publications