Li Lan elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation
The American Society for Clinical Investigation has elected Dr. Li Lan. The society dates from 1908 and takes new members by election alone. It nominates physician-scientists of fifty years and under, so the election marks a strong contribution early in an independent career. Four faculty of the Duke University School of Medicine entered with a class of one hundred, and the society inducted them in Chicago on 5 April 2024.
The election follows the work of the lab on the way cancer cells answer damage to their DNA. That work helped show the part that PARP plays in DNA repair, which stands behind the PARP inhibitors now used against breast and ovarian cancer. The lab later described a repair pathway that depends on mRNA and on R-loops, and that protects the transcribed parts of the genome.
Dr. Lan joined Duke in August 2023 from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She brought a five-year grant of the National Institutes of Health on the R-loop-mediated DNA damage response at telomeres, a grant of the Breast Cancer Alliance, a Harrington Scholar-Innovator Award and a Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Award.
