The 10th annual Mortel Lecture in Cancer Research will be held at 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 12, in Lecture Room D on the campus of the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and Penn State College of Medicine. This year's lecture, "Ligand-directed Targeting and Molecular Imaging in Cancer and Obesity," will be presented by Renata Pasqualini and Wadih Arap.
Pasqualini serves as the Helen Buchanan and Stanley Seeger professor of medicine and experimental diagnostic imaging at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. She and her husband Wadih Arap, professor of medicine and cancer biology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, have a long-standing collaboration and have led a joint laboratory since October 1999. The Arap-Pasqualini Laboratory focuses on the discovery of functional protein interactions in human diseases. Since their arrival at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, they have jointly published more than 100 original peer-reviewed research manuscripts. The central working hypothesis in their program is that differential protein expression in the human vascular endothelium associated with normal or diseased tissue offers the potential for developing novel diagnostic, imaging, and therapeutic strategies.