Chicago-born, UIC-trained researcher shares $500K medical prize

ALBANY, N.Y. — Chicago-born, University of Illinois at Chicago-educated Susan Lee Lindquist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will share the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research — one of the nation’s largest awards in medicine and science.

Lindquist shares the prize with two other researchers whose work with cell proteins has implications for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and other degenerative illnesses — F. Ulrich Hartl of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, and Dr. Arthur Horwich of the Yale School of Medicine.

The researchers were chosen for their fundamental and complementary discoveries related to the mechanisms of “protein folding,” the last step in transferring genetic information from amino acids to cell proteins, according to Dr. Vincent Verdile, dean of Albany Medical College and chairman of the prize committee.