The Society of Nuclear Medicine has given the Benedict Cassen Award to Michael J. Welch, Ph.D., professor of radiology, of molecular biology and pharmacology and of chemistry.
The society, which has 15,000 members, gives the national prize every other year to a scientist or physician “whose work has led to a major advance in basic or clinical nuclear medicine science.”
Michael Welch
Welch has been a leader for more than 30 years in the development of synthetic imaging agents that have allowed doctors to use positron emission tomography to diagnose an increasingly wide variety of disorders.
He is head of the Radiochemistry Institute at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, and since 1979 he has been principal investigator for the University’s longest continuously renewed National Institute of Health grant — a 44-year-old project known as “Cyclotron Isotopes in Biology and Medicine.”
As a Cassen award winner, Welch gave a lecture on his life’s work at the annual summer meeting of the society. At the end of the talk, he emphasized the important contributions of researchers he has collaborated with over the decades.
“Awards are personal recognitions, but you don’t receive them without the people you work with, and I made sure to acknowledge them,” said Welch, who has written 500 papers with approximately 500 co-authors, 13 of whom he’s collaborated with more than 20 times.
Welch, who served as president of the society in 1984, is the sixth scientist to receive the award.
First given by the society in 1994, the Cassen award is named after the scientist who developed the rectilinear radioisotope scanner, the first instrument capable of making an image of an organ inside a patient’s body.
Welch noted that he is the first synthetic chemist to receive the prize and said the award affirms the importance of his specialized branch of nuclear medicine.
“Synthesis of new radiopharmaceuticals is one of the field’s cornerstones and will continue to be so into the foreseeable future,” Welch said. “Our ability to continue to expand the field is dependent on the development of agents that can bind to the new molecular targets scientists are discovering.”
For example, Welch and other scientists supported by the latest renewal of the 44-year-old NIH grant are working to develop new imaging agents that will help scientists trace the connections between diabetes and heart disease.
Welch also recently became an honorary fellow of the American College of Radiology.