The NAVBO Meritorious Awards Committee has named Dr. Peter Carmeliet, Center for Transgene Technology and Gene Therapy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, as the recipient of the 2004 Earl P. Benditt Award for his groundbreaking work on mouse knockout models of vascular disorders, most notably models of thrombosis and angiogenesis. 

Dr. Carmeliet received his Doctor in Medicine degree in 1984 and his Ph.D. in 1989 at KU Leuven.  He was a D. Collen Research Foundation Fellow at Harvard Medical School from 1989-1990 and at the Whitehead Institute from 1990-1992 where, in collaboration with Richard Mulligan, he inactivated the PAI-1 and PA genes and characterized several hemostatic phenotypes that helped pave the way for refined anti-fibrinolytic drugs (JCI 92:2756-60, 1993; Nature 368:419-24, 1994).  Upon returning to his native home of Leuven, Dr. Carmeliet continued work on what has become an extraordinary run of knockout mice having broad defects in vessel development and/or vascular pathology.  Dr. Carmeliet was the first to report on an embryonic lethal phenotype resulting from the genetic inactivation of a single allele, that being VEGF (Nature 380:435-39, 1996).  This dramatic finding stimulated further research on the role of VEGF both as a critical factor in vasculogenesis and as a therapeutic target for cancer and cardiovascular diseases.  In the same year (and journal!) he showed that tissue factor was essential for normal vasculogenesis (Nature 383:73-5, 1996).  He went on further to inactivate several other genes or splice variants of genes having roles in vascular development, vascular occlusion, or myocardial disease; some of the more noteworthy ones include Factor VII (Nature 390:290-4, 1997), HIF-1alpha (Nature 394:485-90, 1998), VEGF164 and VEGF188 (Nature Medicine 5:495-502, 1999), and VE-cadherin (Cell 98:147-57, 1999).  Dr. Carmeliet was also one of the first to inactivate a cis element (HIF) of a promoter (VEGF) and ascribe a phenotype to that missing promoter element (Nature Genetics 28:131-8, 2001).

In recent years, he has continued to work on VEGF and has shown it to be a modifier gene in such pathologies as DiGeorge Syndrome and ALS.  Dr. Carmeliet serves on several prominent Editorial Boards and numerous National and Regional Committees.  His work has been recognized with many awards and lectures including the prestigious Nobel Forum Lecture (invited by Nobel Committee and Karolinska Institute) and the George Brown Lecture of the AHA.  His work has garnered more than a dozen patents and nearly 10,000 citations. 

Dr. Carmeliet’s Benditt Award Lecture, “Functional Angiogenomic in Mice, Zebrafish and Humans,” will be given on Friday, June 4, 2004 at the XIIIth International Vascular Biology Meeting in Toronto, Canada.