A University of British Columbia Chemistry researcher and creator of one of the world’s most successful eye disease treatments has been awarded the 2005 Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, widely recognized as the country’s most prestigious science award.
The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) announced yesterday that UBC Chemistry Prof. Emeritus David Dolphin is this year’s recipient. The annual prize, named in honour of Canadian Nobel laureate Gerhard Herzberg, was presented at a ceremony in Ottawa. The prize guarantees $1 million in NSERC funding over the next five years.
“We are extremely proud of David’s contribution to science and to the health of hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” says UBC President Martha Piper. “This award is recognition of an outstanding career in an exciting and important field, and underlines the value to society of the work done at major research universities like UBC.”
Dolphin pioneered the study of a class of light-activated compounds called porphyrins, organic molecules such as chlorophyll that interact with light. Porphyrins are used in CDs and DVDs, as well as in healing chemicals used for light-based medicine, or photodynamic therapy . His groundbreaking achievement is the creation of the porphyrin-based drug Visudyne™ — the world’s first treatment for age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness.
Dolphin’s research was commercialized in the early 1980s when he and then UBC microbiologist Prof. Julia Levy founded one of Canada’s most renowned university spin-off companies, Vancouver-based QLT Inc. The company manufactures Visudyne ™ which has been used to treat more than 500,000 people in 70 countries since 2000 and is the largest-selling ophthalmology product ever launched.
Dolphin’s research has led to more than 160 patents, including about 50 U.S. patents, and earned UBC approximately $60 million in royalties. He is the author and editor of 18 books and has published more than 400 research papers.
The recipient of many awards and distinctions, Dolphin is a Guggenheim Fellow and winner, along with Levy, of the Prix Galien, a prestigious annual award in the field of Canadian pharmaceutical research that is considered to be the pharmaceutical industry’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
In 2004, he was designated a Hero of Chemistry, the highest award the American Chemical Society gives to an industrial chemist. He is a member of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada. Dolphin holds the NSERC-QLT Industrial Research Chair on Photodynamic Technologies and is currently CEO of the British Columbia Innovation Council.
Other UBC recipients of the Herzberg Medal include the late Peter Hochachka, a professor of Zoology, and the late Keith Brimacombe, a metallurgical engineer.
NSERC, a federal agency, promotes discovery by funding more than 10,000 university professors every year and fosters innovation by encouraging more than 600 Canadian companies to participate and invest in university research projects.
For background on the finalists and the medal, visit www.nserc.gc.ca/news/2006/p060214.htm.
A biography of David Dolphin is attached (see below). A photo is also available at www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/download.
David Dolphin Biography
David Dolphin obtained his PhD at the University of Nottingham in England in 1965. At Harvard University he spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Robert Burns Woodward, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1965. Dolphin was a faculty member of the Chemistry Dept. at Harvard where he stayed for 10 years before joining UBC in 1974.
Dolphin is a University Killam Professor and the QLT/NSERC Industrial Research Professor in Photodynamic Technologies at UBC. Before joining QLT Inc., he was the Acting Dean of Science at UBC and he has been acting Vice-President, Research at UBC in 1999-2000 and in 2005.
In 1990 he was awarded the Gold Medal in Health Sciences by the Science Council of British Columbia. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Chemistry (CIC) and in 1993 was the recipient of CIC’s Syntex Award. In 2004 he received the Canadian Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences Award of Leadership in Canadian Pharmaceutical Sciences; the Confederation of University Faculties of B.C. Academic of the Year Award; and the NSERC Award of Excellence.
Dolphin has also served on many boards including those of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Genome BC (Chair in 2006), TRIUMF, and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and Neuromed Inc.
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