2018 Outstanding Scholarly Physician Award
Shlomo Melmed, MD
Shlomo Melmed, MD, compellingly impacts the practice of pituitary medicine by clinical leadership, educational initiatives, and major translational discoveries in pathophysiology and therapy of pituitary disease.
He has elucidated mechanisms for paracrine pituitary growth factor regulation and pituitary tumorigenesis and identified novel molecules for pituitary tumor therapy. His landmark papers demonstrated mechanisms for pituitary tumorigenesis and intrapituitary ACTH and GH control. He described ectopic GH acromegaly syndrome, discovered pituitary tumor transforming gene, and pioneered receptor subtype-specific analogs for neuroendocrine tumor therapy. He showed that receptor subtype-specific somatostatin analogs target specific pituitary hormone production, discovered the utility of these subtype-specific analogs to enhance pituitary tumor therapy, leading to a new generation of pharmacologic agents, and was global PI for the U.S. registration trials for somatostatin analogs.
Few scholarly physicians have contributed more to our fundamental and clinical understanding of pituitary tumor biology as it is applied to the practice of endocrinology.
Developing rodent and zebrafish models of pituitary tumorigenesis faithfully recapitulating human disease, he identified targeted small molecule inhibitors for aggressive prolactinomas and Cushing disease. Both these discoveries have spawned investigator-initiated NIH-funded prospective clinical trials. He couples translational discoveries with leading roles in developing clinical guidelines, co-authoring three Endocrine Society pituitary medicine guidelines, leading pivotal investigator-initiated clinical trials, and creating original pituitary disease classification.
He is a global leader of clinical education for pituitary medicine as pituitary editor of both the major endocrinology textbooks used worldwide, Williams and Jameson and Degroot respectively, and pituitary co-author for Harrisons. As past editor-in-chief of Endocrinology, and currently of Pituitary, he exemplifies an international pituitary scholar and leader. His exemplary publications in the very highest-quality basic and clinical journals reflect a dual combination of outstanding basic and clinical creativity underscoring his standing as a leading international clinical scholar of pituitary medicine and discovery. Few scholarly physicians have contributed more to our fundamental and clinical understanding of pituitary tumor biology as it is applied to the practice of endocrinology.