2026 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize Symposium

Date and Time

October 1, 2026
01:30PM - 05:30PM EDT

Location

Veritas Science Center Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
2026 Warren Alpert

 

From Discovery to Therapy: Gene-Based Treatments for Sickle Cell Disease and Beta-Thalassemia


The Warren Alpert Foundation and Harvard Medical School invite you to our annual scientific symposium, recognizing five scientists for enabling curative genetic therapies for two major hemoglobin disorders: sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. In rigorous studies spanning two decades, they discovered how to reactivate the production of fetal hemoglobin in adults and optimized hematopoietic cell reconstitution procedures, thereby bringing molecularly
based therapies to patients.

Thursday, October 1
1:30 p.m. I Symposium

Veritas Science Center
Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
Boston, Massachusetts

You may RSVP here.

IN HONOR OF
Daniel E. Bauer, MD, PhD
Donald S. Fredrickson, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Director of the Gene Therapy Program, Boston Children’s Hospital

Stuart H. Orkin, MD ’72
David G. Nathan Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Vijay G. Sankaran, PhD ’09, MD ’10
Jan Ellen Paradise, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Swee Lay Thein, MD
Senior Investigator and Chief of the Sickle Cell Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health

John Tisdale, MD
Senior Investigator and Chief of the Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health

FEATURING
Jennifer Doudna, PhD ’89
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Founder, Innovative Genomics Institute

MODERATED BY
Edward Benz Jr., MD ’73
President and CEO Emeritus, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Richard and Susan Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
 

For more information, please contact Caitlin Craig at hms_events@hms.harvard.edu.

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