John Katzenellenbogen

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John Albert Katzenellenbogen (born May 10, 1944) is an American chemist and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works on developing drugs for breast and prostate cancers and designs estrogens and antiestrogens that have more good effects and fewer side effects.

Katzenellenbogen was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. His parents taught at Vassar College. In 1958 his family moved to Baltimore, where his father led the art history department at Johns Hopkins and his mother taught at Peabody Conservatory and Goucher College. He started playing the cello at age 10. He attended Gilman School and did several summer jobs, including working in a photosynthesis lab in 1960 and being a GE Student Research Fellow at Union College in 1961.

He studied chemistry at Harvard and earned his PhD in 1969 under E. J. Corey. He began his faculty career at UIUC in 1969 as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1975, and a full professor in 1979. He has held endowed chairs, including the Roger Adams Professor and the Swanlund Professor. He helped launch the field of chemical biology. His main research focuses on steroid hormones and their receptors, especially the estrogen receptor. He collaborates widely and has published more than 550 papers and trained over 130 PhD students and postdocs.

Katzenellenbogen is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has won many prizes, such as the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Hershberg Award, the Fred Conrad Koch Lifetime Achievement Award, and an AACR award for outstanding achievements in chemistry in cancer research. In 2018 he was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame of the American Chemical Society.

He developed the first affinity label for the estrogen receptor, a key tool for studying how it works. He mapped how antiestrogens are activated in the body and where they act. He helped create PET imaging agents for estrogen, androgen, and progesterone receptors. The PET tracers FES, FDHT, and FFNP are still used to predict how patients will respond to endocrine therapy and to help develop new cancer drugs. Lately he has worked on new antiestrogens that can treat breast cancer resistant to current therapies and on how estrogen signaling differs across tissues.