David Kessel, Ph.D.

David Kessel, Ph.D., professor of Pharmacology for the Wayne State University School of Medicine, recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Kessel received the award at a July 8 meeting in Moscow sponsored by the International Conference on Porphyrins and Phthaliocyanines, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. The award was for his studies related to Photodynamic Therapy and was funded by the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, where the modern era of PDT began.

“When one of my friends received such an award, his first comment was: ‘Does this mean I don't have to do anything else?’ In my case, I realized that this was not going to work, since I still had a few more years of NIH grant support, students to deal with and the realization that I would be assigned to space in a landfill if I failed to keep my research program going,” Dr. Kessel said.

The award to Dr. Kessel was the academy’s first for achievements in the field of Photodynamic Therapy, a procedure for “selectively photosensitizing malignant tissues to light,” Dr. Kessel explained. The process is used for therapy of bladder, esophageal, lung skin, gastrointestinal and -- in experimental protocols -- prostate cancer.

Dr. Kessel, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and Harvard Medical School, was named professor of Pharmacology and Medicine at Wayne State University in 1974. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health since 1959.

The International Photodynamic Association, founded in Japan in 1986, meets every two years, bringing together mainly clinical personnel but also basic scientists. At the 2007 meeting in Shanghai, Dr. Kessel was elected the association’s next president. He is charged with organizing the next meeting, scheduled for June 2009 in Seattle.