07 June 2017
Professor Robert Hider receives the Paul Ehrlich Award
Professor Robert Hider, Institute of Pharmaceutical Science has received the biennial Paul Ehrlich Award for Exceptional Scientific Contributions and Leadership in the field of Iron Biology.
Professor Hider was invited to speak at the 7th Congress of the InternationalBioIron Society (IBIS) Biennial World Meeting in Los Angeles this year. His talk ‘Iron Chelation: Past, Present and Future’ was followed by a plenary session celebrating 50 years of iron chelation. The Society boasts around 1000 members and the award was presented by the President of IBIS Robert E Fleming.
About Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich was a German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. He invented the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria. The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the capability to diagnose numerous blood diseases.
His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (Salvarsan), the first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, thereby initiating and also naming the concept of chemotherapy. Ehrlich popularized the concept of a magic bullet. He also made a decisive contribution to the development of an antiserum to combat diphtheriaand conceived a method for standardizing therapeutic serums.
In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology.[2] He was the founder and first director of what is now known as the Paul Ehrlich Institute.