Recognition of a Lifetime of Research
Alan Cohen (MED’52) received an outstanding achievement award at the XI International Symposium on Amyloidosis.
In recognition of his career as a researcher, clinician, editor, and colleague, Alan Cohen (MED’52), a Distinguished Professor of Medicine emeritus in rheumatology and a researcher at the Boston University School of Medicine, recently received an award for outstanding achievement in the field of amyloidosis at the XI International Symposium on Amyloidosis.
Cohen, who founded the Amyloid Treatment and Research Program at the School of Medicine in 1960, is the founding and current editor of Amyloid: The Journal of Protein Folding Disorders and has written or edited 12 books and more than 700 research publications.
While a fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Cohen isolated amyloid as a unique fibrous protein, achieved its high-resolution characterization for the first time with the electron microscope, and reported it at the First International Symposium on Amyloidosis, held in Groningen, Netherlands, in 1967. He conducted biochemical studies on the relationship of amyloid fibril to other proteins, carbohydrates, GAGs, and lipids, as well as immunological and protein sequence studies that led to the definition of amyloid types. Since then, Cohen and his colleagues have reported at every subsequent International Symposium on Amyloidosis.
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.