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Snider to be honored with lifetime achievement award |
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Gordon L. Snider, MD
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BOSTON Gordon L. Snider, MD, showed how emphysema is created and changed the direction of lung disease research for decades.
He founded the pulmonary section of the Boston University School of Medicine and was chief of medical service at the Boston VA Medical Center for 14 years.
He served as president of the American Thoracic Society. He trained dozens of young researchers. Her served on the Pulmonary Disease Advisory Board of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health and innumerable scientific committees.
And he conducted his own ground-breaking research on lung diseases for more than four decades.
Snider, who lives in Longmeadow, will be honored at a luncheon at the Marriott Boston Cambridge Oct. 23. The Alpha-1 Foundation will present Snider with a lifetime achievement award at the event, expected to be attended by more than 100 of his colleagues and researchers he trained.
Snider and colleagues showed that normal white blood cells called neutrophils can destroy lung tissue and create emphysema, one of the major causes of death in the United States and the world.
"Probably Gordon's biggest accomplishment was showing that neutrophil elastase has the capacity to create emphysema in animal models," said Steven Shapiro, MD. "His group and other pioneered this concept and changed the focus of pulmonary research."
Shapiro, formerly of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital, is professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
Snider's discovery led him to study alpha-1 antitrypsin, the major "anti-elastase" in the lung, which normally prevents lung damages from neutrophils. He published many studies on Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, a genetic condition in which low levels of the Alpha-1 protein often lead to severe emphysema, even in people who never smoked.
Snider served for a decade on the Alpha-1 Foundation board of directors and is currently a member of its medical and scientific advisory committee. The event will also be a fundraiser to support future conferences of the Foundation's Gordon L. Snider Critical Issues workshop Series.
To attend, donate or put a message in the program book, contact Angela McBride, amcbide@alphaone.org. or 888-825-7421.
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