Richard Edelson, MD ’70, the Aaron B. and Marguerite Lerner Professor of Dermatology and chair of the department, received the 2015 Discovery Award from the Dermatology Foundation during its annual meeting on March 21 in San Francisco.
The award recognizes an outstanding investigator “whose research accomplishments have greatly impacted the understanding of cutaneous biology, identified a previously unrecognized disease, or developed a revolutionary new therapy,” according to the foundation.
Edelson was honored for achievements in all three realms. He identified and named the previously unrecognized cancer known as cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL), developed the first FDA-approved treatment for the malignancy, and elucidated principles of tumor progression and resolution in CTCL, according to the Foundation. The therapy, extracorporeal photochemotherapy (ECP), became the first selective immunotherapy approved by the FDA for any cancer, in 1988.
Edelson hypothesized in 1975 that the malignancy arises from precursor white blood cells, which he called cutaneous T-cells and which normally patrol the skin against infectious invaders. If inadequately treated, CTCL is commonly fatal, with a median survival of only five years from the time of diagnosis. However, the clinical application of scientific insights made by Edelson and colleagues has largely tamed CTCL. “Its natural evolution to a dangerous cancer can now largely be interrupted,” Edelson said. “Fortunately, even in its advanced stages, the disease can often be effectively treated by ECP.”
Edelson and Yale colleagues including Robert Tigelaar, M.D., Michael Girardi, M.D., and the late Carole Berger, Ph.D., found that ECP’s clinical efficacy results from its physiologic partnership with dendritic antigen presenting cells, the master-switches of the immune system. This has raised the possibility that ECP may now be useful in a broader spectrum of cancers and autoimmune diseases.
About three-quarters of immunologically competent patients with advanced CTCL respond to ECP, which is now commonly also used to treat graft-versus-host disease and the immune rejection of transplanted organs. The immunotherapeutic technique was the subject of the National Institutes of Health State of the Science Symposium in Therapeutic Apheresis in November 2012
Because of ECP’s ability to induce both anticancer immunity and tolerance to grafts, with few side effects and an excellent safety record, the therapy has been administered more than 3 million times to more than 50,000 patients in the United States and Europe.
Edelson, a 1970 alumnus of the School of Medicine, has served on the Yale faculty since 1986, when he was recruited to head the department as its second chair. He previously served on the Columbia University faculty after residency training there and at Massachusetts General Hospital and following a three-year fellowship in immunology at the NIH. During his Yale career, he has also served as director of Yale Cancer Center and as the school’s deputy dean for clinical affairs.