Adeoye, Guilak, Gutmann, Kipnis elected to National Academy of Medicine

October 17, 2022

Election is one of the highest honors for contributions to health, medicine

Adapted from WUSM News Release; originally written by Julia Evangelou Strait, Tamara Bhandari & Jim Dryden.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis faculty members Opeolu M. Adeoye, MD, Farshid Guilak, PhD, David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD, and Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

Four faculty members at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences. They are Opeolu M. Adeoye, MD; Farshid Guilak, PhD; David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD; and Jonathan Kipnis, PhD. Membership in the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Adeoye, Guilak, Gutmann and Kipnis are among 100 new members whose election to the academy was announced Monday, Oct. 17. Members of the organization elect new members based on their contributions to advancing public health, health care and medical science. All members volunteer to serve on committees examining a broad range of health-policy issues.

David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD

Gutmann is the Donald O. Schnuck Family Professor in the Department of Neurology. He is an international authority in neurofibromatosis (NF) cancer predisposition syndromes, complex genetic disorders that cause tumors to grow on nerves in the brain and throughout the body. As a practicing physician-scientist, he established a clinical program for people with NF in 1994 and founded the Washington University NF Center in 2004, one of the world’s largest centers focused on accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and its application to the care of individuals with NF.

Gutmann is being recognized for his seminal contributions to the field of NF and related disorders, establishing novel human and murine preclinical model systems to elucidate the impact of germline genetics, cancer cells of origin, and the tumor microenvironment on pediatric brain tumor biology, patient risk assessment, clinical outcomes and targeted therapeutics.

Gutmann and his team leverage human stem cells and genetically engineered mice to define the factors that underlie disease risk, with a goal of improving precision medicine for this highly variable disease. Using these tools, they have begun to define the contributions of immune cells (microglia and T cells) to brain tumor formation and growth, as well as the mechanisms by which immune cells in brain tumors cause vision loss. In addition, Gutmann has been exploring the role neurons play in brain and nerve tumor growth, making him one of the pioneers in the emerging field of cancer neuroscience. Recently, his group showed that repurposing drugs used to treat epilepsy can block the growth of brain and nerve tumors.

Gutmann is also a fellow of the American Neurological Association, the American Academy of Neurology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Physicians.