Lynne Maquat wins Albany Prize, Janssen Award

The recent honors recognize Maquat's contributions to the understanding of RNA mechanisms, including her discovery of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay.

Lynne Maquat, director of the University of Rochester Center for RNA Biology, is the winner of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research and the Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research. Honored for her research on RNA mechanisms that contribute to a wide range of diseases, Maquat's work has laid the foundation for the development of treatments targeting conditions that can't always be corrected with conventional drugs, such as cystic fibrosis, cancers, and fragile X syndrome.

The J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Maquat has spent her career deciphering the many roles that RNA plays in sickness and in health and is well known for her discovery of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay, or NMD. One of the major surveillance systems in the body, NMD protects against innate mistakes in gene expression by targeting and eliminating deleterious mRNAs that could lead to the production of incomplete and potentially toxic proteins that can cause disease.

Maquat shares the Dr. Paul Janssen Award with Alexander Varshavsky of the California Institute of Technology, and the Albany Prize with Howard Chang of Stanford University School of Medicine, and Adrian Krainer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Past winners of both awards have gone on to with the Nobel Prize.

"Lynne's scientific career is nothing short of outstanding and her contributions have brought RNA biology to the leading edge of medicine," says David Linehan, CEO of the University of Rochester Medical Center and dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry. "These back-to-back awards acknowledge her exceptional ability to discover, innovate, and push the limits of scientific understanding, and we're extremely proud that her efforts are being acknowledged with these major honors."

• Learn more about Maquat's Albany Prize and Janssen Award