The Journal’s Lifetime Achievement Award is an unsolicited award given annually to honour the sustained outstanding scientific achievements of a researcher working in the broad fields of drug delivery and targeting. This year’s winner, as in previous years, was selected by a scientific panel comprising members of the Editorial board and representatives from Taylor and Francis, the publishers of Journal of Drug Targeting.
It gives me great pleasure to announce that Professor Pieter R Cullis from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of British Columbia, Canada is the recipient of this year’s Journal of Drug Targeting’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Journal’s Lifetime Achievement Award recognises Professor Cullis’s life-long, high profile, research into lipids, biological membranes and liposomal drug delivery systems. His lipid-based drug delivery systems have already produced clinical formulations for several anti-cancer drugs amongst others and his recent research into lipid-based delivery systems for nucleic acids is close to enabling RNA interference technology to finally reach the clinic.
Professor Pieter Cullis is currently the Director of the Life Sciences Institute as well as of the NanoMedicines Research Group and Chair of the Personalized Medicine Initiative at the University of British Columbia. He seems to have had a life-long attachment to the University of British Columbia (UBC) as that was where he began his scientific career as a physics undergraduate before completing his PhD in Physics there in 1972. He then crossed the Atlantic Ocean to undergo postdoctoral training in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford as an MRC postdoctoral fellow and then at the University of Utrecht as a fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He returned to his beloved UBC in 1978 as an academic faculty member and was appointed as a professor in 1985.
Pieter has been a prolific researcher and has published well over 300 scientific articles in top-rated journals, including Nature and Science, covering the broad field of lipids, biological membranes and liposomal drug-delivery systems. His work has been highly cited with nearly 38,000 citations and has an impressive h-Index, according to Google Scholar, of 104. In addition, he is an inventor on over 40 patents and his entrepreneurial endeavours have led to three drugs that have been approved for clinical use in the U.S. and Europe for the treatment of cancer and its complications and five more that have reached Phase I clinical trials.
Keen to translate his research into clinical applications, Pieter has been very active in the development of several biotechnology companies and has acquired the reputation of being a remarkable entrepreneur and innovator. Indeed, he has founded or co-founded several well-known commercial enterprises including The Canadian Liposome Company, Inex Pharmaceuticals (now Tekmira Pharmaceuticals), Northern Lipids Inc., Lipex Biomembranes Inc., Acuitas Pharmaceuticals, Precision NanoSystems and Mesentech Inc.
Prof. Cullis has already received many prestigious awards for his research during his career including the British Columbia Science Council Gold Medal for Health Sciences in 1991, the Alec D. Bangham Award for contributions to liposome science and technology in 2000 and the British Columbia Biotechnology Association award for Innovation and Achievement in 2002. In addition, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004, received the Leadership Award of the Canadian Society of Pharmaceutical Scientists in 2010, awarded the Prix Galien – Canada’s top prize for achievements in pharmaceutical research and development in 2011 and more recently received the Milton Wong award for Leadership in April 2015. The Journal of Drug Targeting is therefore very delighted to add another award to his name by bestowing its prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award for 2016 to Professor Pieter Cullis for his many sustained and outstanding contributions to the field of lipid-based drug-delivery systems.
As a part of the recognition for this award, I am truly indebted to Professor Terry Allen, Professor Emerita in Pharmacology and Oncology at the University of Alberta and Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia for agreeing to be the Guest Editor of this special issue. She has compiled an excellent set of articles from eminent scientists and/or colleagues of Professor Cullis to give our readers a flavour of the research Pieter has been involved in over the years. I refer you to these articles, some of which include personal reflections and insights into the research achievements of Professor Cullis that have led up to this award from the Journal of Drug Targeting. Indeed, the print copy of this special issue, along with a commemorative plaque will be awarded to Professor Cullis as a part of the award.
I am sure that readers of the Journal and other researchers in the field will agree that Professor Cullis is an immensely deserving winner of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Our congratulations to you Pieter and wishing you every success in your future endeavours in academia, industry and beyond!