Dr. W. Ian Lipkin Awarded Drexel Medicine Prize in Translational Medicine

W. Ian Lipkin, MD, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health, has been awarded the Drexel Medicine Prize in Translational Medicine by the Drexel University College of Medicine. He was presented with the award on June 19th at the School’s 2013 International Symposium on Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease. Attendees at the three-day conference include investigators and scientists from more than 30 academic institutions and industrial organizations.

Dr. Lipkin, who is also a professor of Neurology and Pathology at Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons, is internationally recognized as an authority on the use of molecular methods for pathogen discovery and the role of infection in neurologic and neuropsychiatric diseases.  He was the first to use purely molecular methods to identify infectious agents, implicated West Nile virus as the cause of the encephalitis epidemic in New York in 1999, assisted the WHO and the People’s Republic of China during the 2003 SARS outbreak and pioneered the use of high throughput sequencing in pathogen discovery.

He and his team have discovered or characterized more than 500 infectious agents including Borna disease virus, West Nile virus, LuJo virus, human rhinovrirus C, piscine reovirus and nonhuman primate hepacivirus. In April of 2003, he sequenced a portion of the SARS virus directly from lung tissue, established a sensitive assay for infection, and hand carried 10,000 test kits to Beijing at the height of the outbreak. As the first foreign consultant to gain the confidence of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Science he was named Special Advisor to China for Research and International Cooperation in Infectious Diseases. Approximately ten years later, in May 2013, he established the first international laboratory within the CDC of China. In 2003, Dr. Lipkin helped to establish the Norwegian Autism Birth Cohort (ABC), the largest prospective birth cohort devoted to investigating gene-environment-timing interactions and biomarker discovery. He is currently working with the Ministry of Health of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to identify the animal reservoir of the MERS coronavirus and develop diagnostic assays for infection.

Dr. Lipkin has served as co-chair of the Steering Committee of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee, as Director of the Northeast Biodefense Center and the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center on Diagnostics, Surveillance and Immunotherapeutics for Emerging Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases, has ongoing collaborations and projects with the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, USAID PREDICT, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and was the scientific consultant for the Soderbergh film Contagion.