Jason Sheltzer

At Stanford, I’ll be affiliated with the Stanford Cancer Institute, Radiation Oncology, and Pathology. My lab will be in the Research Park complex on Page Mill Road. I’m looking forward to getting to know my new community! Feel free to reach out and say hi.

As some of you may know, my wife Joan has been leading AI infrastructure engineering at Google. I’m grateful that we have the chance to relocate to the Bay Area, which offers so many phenomenal opportunities in tech, biotech, and biomedical research.

I’ve had a terrific experience at Yale, and I’m sad to be leaving an amazing group of collaborators and friends. Yale has created a cutting-edge environment for translational cancer research and I’m thankful for all of the things that I’ve been able to learn here.

I’m thrilled to share that I’m joining the faculty at the Stanford University School of Medicine. My lab and I will be relocating to Stanford this summer!

If you're an international PhD student at Harvard working on something that my lab is familiar with and you're at risk of deportation, shoot me an email. We may be able to host you or find someone else who can.

The VC firm Lux Capital has launched a new $100M program to help scientists whose funding has been cut. Looks amazing - and I hope that more venture firms and philanthropies will follow their lead.

www.luxcapital.com/news/our-hel...

Breakthrough Prize – Breakthrough Prize Announces 2025 Laureates in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences was awarded to:

Drucker, Habener, Holst, Knudsen, and Mojsov for GLP-1/ozempic,

Hauser and Ascherio for treating multiple sclerosis,

and David Liu for CRISPR base editing.

Terrific choices!

breakthroughprize.org/News/91

For the first time since January, notification of a new NIH study section meeting has been posted on the Federal Register. It seems to cover multiple review panels, including one for the DP2/New Innovator grant.

www.federalregister.gov/agencies/nat...

It’s a prime example of how public investment in research yields life-saving treatments, and many - including President Trump - benefit from this history.

In the end, statin development owes a huge debt to NIH-funded science. NIH-backed research identified high cholesterol as a major disease risk​, discovered how to reduce it, and provided critical evidence that saved statin development when industry faltered​.

Bolstered by these findings, Merck revived its statin program and launched large-scale trials that proved that statins safely lowered the risk of heart attacks. In 1987, lovastatin earned FDA approval, launching a new era in heart disease prevention.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Outside of pharma, NIH-funded researchers continued to evaluate statins. Brown and Goldstein showed that it safely lowered cholesterol in dogs, and others showed that it produced positive results in patients with abnormally high cholesterol levels.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6262757/

A historical perspective on the discovery of statins Cholesterol is essential for the functioning of all human organs, but it is nevertheless the cause of coronary heart disease. Over the course of nearly a century of investigation, scientists have deve...

In 1980, Merck initiated the first clinical trials using an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, called lovastatin. But the initial trials were halted over safety concerns - potentially ending statin’s commercial development.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

NIH-funded investigators, including Konrad Bloch, Michael Brown, and Joseph Goldstein, uncovered the biochemical pathways that produced cholesterol and identified HMG-CoA reductase as a potential target for decreasing cholesterol synthesis.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Framingham Heart Study (FHS) This long-term, multigenerational study is designed to identify common factors or characteristics that contribute to cardiovascular disease.

The Framingham Heart Study - an NIH project launched in 1948 - provided the first proof that high blood cholesterol is a major risk factor for heart disease​. This insight made lowering cholesterol a top priority for prevention.

www.nhlbi.nih.gov/science/fram...

A Rundown of Trump's Prescription Medications The list includes Propecia, a drug for hair loss.

President Trump takes statins - an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor that lowers blood cholesterol. Decades of NIH-funded research paved the way for statin development.

www.newsweek.com/all-presiden...

Did you know - the medicine that President Trump takes each day to lower his risk of having a heart attack is a direct result of NIH funding? Let me explain -

What is the best degron tag that you can use to inducibly degrade a protein of interest in mice?

Forbes 30 Under 30 2024: Science Inventing the future from the atom up

Congrats to Sheltzer Lab alum Vish Girish for being recognized on the #Forbes30Under30 list for Science!

www.forbes.com/30-under-30/...