| 1 | Name: | Dr. Maria Jasin | |
| Institution: | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1956 | ||
Maria Jasin is a Professor and molecular biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. Other experience includes serving as a professor at the Weill Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences. Jasin is a giant in the field of gene editing for genome modification and how spontaneous "gene editing" is causally linked to breast cancers. She received the 2019 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine "for her work showing that localized double-strand breaks in DNA stimulate recombination in mammalian cells. This seminal work was essential for and led directly to the tools enabling editing at specific sites in mammalian genomes." She discovered double-strand DNA break repair proceeded both by non-homologous end-joining repair (mutagenesis) and, astonishingly, homology-directed repair (HDR) (precise gene correction). Thus, she established that an endonuclease-generated double strand break in DNA is an efficient approach for gene editing, setting the paradigm that specified genomic DNA damage enables genome modification. She also found that the breast cancer suppressors BRCA1 and BRCA2 are crucial for HDR, and established HDR as a tumor suppression mechanism, discoveries which have transformed therapeutic approaches. She is the recipient of the Basser Global Prize for BRCA Research, from the University of Pennsylvania, and the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Jasin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |||