John O'Shea

A List
4/25/11

Speaker At SLU Examines Lessons Learned From Rare Diseases

CANTON - National Institutes of Health physician and immunologist John O'Shea, will give a talk on Thursday, April 28, at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of Hepburn Hall, Room 218, at St. Lawrence University, on "Lessons from Rare Diseases: Scientific Insights and New Drugs." The event, part of the University's Contemporary Issues Forum, is open to the public, free of charge.

In the talk, O'Shea will address how patients with rare primary immunodeficiencies have taught us fundamental lessons about cell signaling and how this, in turn, has led to the development of a new class of immunomodulatory drugs.

A 1974 graduate of St. Lawrence, O'Shea has been a physician and immunologist at the National Institutes of Health for 27 years. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles published in the most prestigious scientific journals, including Nature and Science. He is a recognized authority on how cytokines regulate immunity and has made fundamental discoveries regarding the molecular basis for cytokine signaling, the pathogenesis of primary immunodeficiencies and the genetic basis of autoinflammatory disorders. O'Shea was awarded a U.S. patent related to generating Janus family kinase inhibitors as a new class of immunosuppressive drugs.

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More about John O'Shea '74, from the NIH web site