The 2006 Dolph Adams Award and the State of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology

This is the 9th year that the Society of Leukocyte Biology has awarded authors cash prizes in honor of Dolph Adams. The $1000 cash award recognizes the most highly cited research paper and highly cited review article published during the previous 5 years in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. The prizes are awarded directly to the corresponding authors, who can decide how they will be distributed. The 2005 Dolph Adams Award winner for the most highly cited research article was Dr. Matthew J. Fenton, corresponding author of the manuscript “Different Toll-like receptor agonists induce distinct macrophage responses” [(2001) J. Leukoc. Biol. 69, 1036–1044], at 100 citations. The award winner for the most highly cited review article was Dr. Robert Strieter, corresponding author of the manuscript “CXC chemokines in angiogenesis” [(2000) J. Leukoc. Biol. 68, 1– 8], at 176 citations. We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2006 Dolph Adams Award for an original research paper: Dr. Benhur Lee, who is currently an assistant professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics with a joint appointment in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UCLA. The manuscript, “Constitutive and induced expression of DCSIGN on dendritic cell and macrophage subpopulations in situ and in vitro” by Elizabeth J. Soilleux, Lesley S. Morris, George Leslie, Jihed Chehimi, Qi Luo, Ernest Levroney, John Trowsdale, Luis J. Montaner, Robert W. Doms, Drew Weissman, Nicholas Coleman, and Benhur Lee [(2002) J. Leukoc. Biol. 71, 445– 457], has scored 99 citations in the past 5 years. Dr. Lee graduated Yale University School of Medicine in 1995, and after a Clinical Pathology residency at University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 2001. Dr. Lee notes that this award-winning paper was the first paper published from his own laboratory with himself as the corresponding author. Dr. Lee was delighted to learn of the award, which he will share with the first author and major collaborator on this work, Dr. Elizabeth Soilleux. He believes that the paper is highly cited, as it was the first paper to explore cell-specific expression of the viral attachment molecule dendritic cell-specific ICAM-grabbing nonintegrin (DC-SIGN) with antibodies with stringently defined specificity. He also notes that this manuscript provided the first glimpse at what cytokines might elicit DC-SIGN expression, which in hindsight, was quite an important finding. Currently, the Lee lab is exploring interactions between DC-SIGN and the envelope proteins of HIV, with an eye toward developing a vaccine that blocks the interaction between HIV and DC. In other recent work, Dr. Lee has made quite a splash with the identification of a cellular receptor for paramyxovirus, Nipah virus [Negrete, O. A. , et al. (2005) Nature 436, 401– 405], and his analysis of virus glycans, which proceed to the observation that the carboyhydrate-binding protein, galectin-1, completely blocks Nipah virus entry into cells [Levroney, E. L. , et al. (2005) J. Immunol. 175, 413– 420]. Nipah virus, which can result in as much as a 70% mortality rate, has been identified as a potential bioterrorism agent and remains prevalent in Dr. Lee’s original home country of Singapore.