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The Japan Prize Foundation, which bestows one of the world's most respected scientific awards, announced that Janet Rowley, MD, Nicholas Lydon, PhD, and Brian Druker, MD, will share its 2012 prize for their trailblazing leukemia research and the development of imatinib (Gleevec; Novartis).

In 1973, using newly developed methods for visualizing segments of chromosomes, Rowley discovered that nearly all patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) harbor a chromosome translocation that creates the mutant gene BCR-ABL. [Photo courtesy of Dan Dry for the University of Chicago.]

Twenty years later, Lydon, a medicinal chemist at Ciba-Geigy, now part of Novartis, began collaborating with Druker. The pair tested an agent, later named imatinib, from Lydon's drug program against CML cells in Druker's lab. Druker subsequently led trials of the drug in patients. The trials were so successful that imatinib received the fastest approval in history from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Currently, Rowley is the Blum-Riese Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine, of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, and of Human Genetics, at the University of Chicago. Druker is the director of the Oregon Health and Science University Knight Cancer Institute in Portland, OR. Lydon is the co-founder and director of Blueprint Medicines in Cambridge, MA.

Rowley, Lydon, and Druker will receive a gold medal and certificate during the award ceremony in Tokyo in April. They will also split the cash prize of 50 million Japanese yen (about $650,000).

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at www.AACR.org/CDnews.