Christine Spitzweg, M.D.
October 31, 2014 — The recipient of the 2014 Van Meter Award, established in 1930 by the American Thyroid Association for outstanding contributions by a young clinical scientist to research on the thyroid gland is Christine Spitzweg, M.D., Professor in Internal Medicine/Endocrinology, Chair of the Thyroid Center, Co-chair of the Center for Neuroendocrine Tumors, and Head of the research laboratory for Molecular Endocrinology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. Dr. Spitzweg delivered the Van Meter Award lecture, entitled “The sodium iodide symporter – its evolving role as theranostic gene in and outside of the thyroid gland” at the 84th Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association on Friday, October 31st, in Coronado, California. The Van Meter Award receives support from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers of the journal Thyroid, and a generous endowment gift in memory of Jack Robbins.
Dr. Spitzweg has had a pioneering role in pursuing the medical applications of the sodium-iodide symporter (NIS) in diagnostics and in therapeutic gene therapy. Her research helped lay the foundation for the field of therapeutic applications of NIS. She is a Principal Investigator on a Nationwide Priority Program in German focusing on “Translation of Thyroid Hormone Actions beyond Classical Concepts,” which explores the use of NIS as a reporter gene to investigate non-genomic effects of the thyroid hormones T4 and T3 and the thyroid hormone analogue tetraiodothyroacetic acid (tetrac) on the tumor microenvironment.
Dr. Spitzweg is also the Principal Investigator of a large collaborative research grant to study image-guided, tumor-targeted radionuclide therapy in disseminated tumors using NIS as theranostic gene. She has conducted numerous studies designed to determine the factors that regulate endogenous NIS gene expression in various tissues and has applied NIS gene therapy to models of several cancers, including prostate cancer, hepatocellular and colon cancer and medullary thyroid cancer.
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