User talk:Asbachmann

André S. Bachmann (born 5 April, 1968) is a Swiss cell biologist and Associate Professor at the University of Hawaii. He has done research on pediatric cancer neuroblastoma, where he discovered that ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) inhibitor alpha-difluoromethylornithine (DFMO, eflornithine) is effective in the treatment of children with neuroblastoma. He received the Weinman Prize for Innovations in Translational Research in 2010.

Bachmann was born in Zurich, Switzerland, went to the Gymnasium in Oerlikon and studied biology at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. He received a Diplom (M.S.) in microbiology in 1994 and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Natural Sciences and Mathematics (cancer biology/natural products) in 1998, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Medical Virology of the University of Zurich. Two years later, he moved to the United States of America and worked at Hawaii Biotech Inc in Honolulu. He contributed to the studies that led to the development of a dengue vaccine. He became an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center in 2001 where he began his investigations with neuroblastoma. In 2002 he proposed to repurpose an older drug (DFMO) still in use for the treatment of African Sleeping Sickness (trypanosomiasis) for a new indication, MYCN-amplified neuroblastoma. In 2008 he met pediatric oncologist Dr. Sholler (DeVos Children’s Hospital) and together and with parent advocates they moved DFMO from bench to clinic commencing a phase I study with relapsed/refractory neuroblastoma patients in 2010. Bachmann became a tenured associate professor and adjunct professor at the John A. Burns School of Medicine and moved to the Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy in Hilo in 2010. He was Chairman of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences from 2010 until 2013. In 2012, Bachmann and Sholler in collaboration with the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium (NMTRC) began a chemopreventive phase II study with DFMO and neuroblastoma patients in remission. The Bachmann/Sholler studies with DFMO have drawn international attention because high-risk pediatric neuroblastoma is still incurable with no effective drugs for relapse/refractory patients, which ultimately leads to death. Bachmann is editorial board member of the AACR journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics and served as Associate Editor of the journal Pharmaceutical Biology from 2009-2012. Bachmann discovered that the plant pathogen-derived phaseolotoxin exhibits anticancer activity in leukemia and described a new class of proteasome inhibitors (syrbactins) in collaboration with Dr. Robert Dudler (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Dr. Michael Groll (Technical University Munich, Germany) which was published in Nature (2008, 452:755-8). The University of Hawaii filed a patent which was granted on Dec. 3 2013 and now owned by Pono Pharma, a Honolulu-based start-up biotech company. He discovered PRAF2, an endosome-resident protein that is involved in the regulation of Rab-dependent vesicle trafficking and showed that PRAF2 is a prognostic marker and correlates with unfavourable genetic and clinical features of neuroblastoma (Clinical Cancer Research, 2007, 13:6312-9).

Bachmann is married and has one daughter from his first wife and one son from his second wife. He is a direct descendant of Ritter (knight) Melchior Lussy (1529-1606) from Stans, Unterwalden, as Swiss catholic statesman who represented the Catholic cantons of Switzerland in the Council of Trent.