Biography

The 2011 Innovations in Neuropsychopharmacology Award will be presented to Dr. Moshe Szyf at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Montreal, Quebec. The Innovations Award, sponsored by Pfizer Canada Inc., is designed to recognize innovative research by Canadian scientists in research in the field of neuropsychopharmacology.

Dr. Szyf's research over the last three decades has focused on understanding the basic principles of the DNA methylation machinery. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University working with Aharon Razin on basic mechanisms of DNA methylation. Dr. Szyf then went on to a postdoctoral fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School and was appointed as an Assistant Professor at McGill University in Pharmacology and Therapeutics in 1989. Dr. Szyf is currently a James McGill and Glaxo SmithKline-CIHR Professor of Pharmacology at McGill University. In 1994 following a decade of studies of the DNA methyltransferase gene and its regulation, Szyf proposed DNA methyltransferase as a prime therapeutic target (Trends Pharmacol. Sci. 15, 233, 1994) and filed a number of broad patents based on these ideas. The laboratory of Dr. Szyf developed antisense and direct inhibitors of DNA methyltransferase in collaboration with Hybridon Inc. in Worcester, MA, and demonstrated their efficacy as anticancer agents in preclinical models (Proc. Natl. Acad.Sci USA 94, 684-689, 1997). This led to the foundation of the first pharmaceutical company in the world dedicated to epigenetic drugs, MethylGene in Montreal. Dr. Szyf's vision that DNA methylation machinery is a therapeutic target is now two decades widely accepted and several large companies are developing drugs targeting the DNA methylation machinery. The laboratory of Dr. Szyf has demonstrated that DNA methylation is a reversible biological signal (Nature 397, 579-583 (1999;Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96, 6107-6112, 1999). This paved the way to realizing that DNA methylation could be modulated after birth and be responsive to external environmental signals. In collaboration with Dr. Michael Meaney, Dr. Szyf's lab discovered an epigenetic mechanism by which maternal behavior results in a stable alteration of the glucocorticoid receptor gene by DNA methylation in the hippocampus of the offspring (Weaver et al. Nature Neuroscience 7, 847, 2004). New data from his lab shows that a similar process is associated with human suicide (McGowan et al. PLoS ONE 3, e2085, 2008) and that marks of childhood adversity are found in adult human brains (McGowan et al. Nature Neuroscience 12, 342, 2009). These data provide a paradigm on how "nurture" alters "nature". Dr. Szyf's work has led to a paradigm shift in our understanding of the relationship between the environment and the genome, and introduced the idea that the social environment could talk to, and sculpt, the genome. An additional novel concept introduced by Dr. Szyf is that the epigenome serves as a mechanism for adaptive response of the genome to signals in early life. These signals trigger a systemic response in the epigenome that programs the genome to adapt to the anticipated lifelong environment. The novel idea of a response rather than a stochastic change in epigenetic markings is diametrically different from the random-chance appearance of single nucleotide polymorphisms. The lab of Dr. Szyf has developed some of the most advanced methods for computing whole-genome DNA methylation arrays. Dr. Szyf has led several international collaboration and cross-disciplinary teams. Dr. Szyf is currently the founding co-director of the Sackler institute for epigenetics and psychobiology and is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Experience-based Brain and Biological Development program, an important interdisciplinary group. Dr. Szyf has published more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals, almost exclusively on epigenetics. Dr. Szyf is an inventor of dozens of issued and patents in the application process, all the patents relate to "epigenetics" based therapeutics. Recently Dr. Szyf with his collaborators Meaney and Turecki were recognized scientists of the year by RadioCanada and their paper on suicide epigenetics as the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.

Dr. Moshe Szyf is undoubtedly a most deserving and worthy recipient for the 2011 CCNP Innovations in Neuropsychopharmacology Award. Congratulations to Dr. Moshe!