VA Maryland Health Care System

VAMHCS Researcher Receives Scientific American 50 Award (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)

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Photo Caption:  Pictured is Dr. Robert Rohwer, reseacher and recipient of the Scientific American 50 Award.

Scientific American Magazine announced in its January 2008 issue that Dr. Robert Rohwer, a researcher at the Baltimore VA Medical Center, a division of the VA Maryland Health Care System, will receive the prestigious Scientific America 50 Award.  Dr. Rohwer is receiving the award for his ground breaking research to develop a “filter” that might be able to purge red blood cells of disease-causing prions.

“This year’s SciAm 50 awards are replete with instances of new machines or chemicals that come close to the true meaning of innovation as something entirely new,” states the Scientific American article.

Rohwer worked with a group of researchers looking for a protective mechanism against variant-Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human form of mad cow disease). Rohwer’s research identified a chemical compound, L13, which sticks to prions causing an illness called scrapie.  Scrapie-containing blood filtered through beads coated with L13 and then injected into hamsters did not cause disease in the animals, unlike tainted, unfiltered blood.

For the past 30 years, Rohwer has conducted research on the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) diseases, including: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease; scrapie, which infects sheep and goats; and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a newly emergent disease that infects both cattle and humans. 

Besides his work at the Baltimore VA, Dr. Rohwer consults on the management of TSE risks for the World Health Organization, the European Commission, Health Canada, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the American Red Cross, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and numerous commercial clients in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and related industries.The Scientific American article described Rohwer as “another visionary paving the way for treating mysterious and deadly prion diseases such as mad cow.”

Award winners highlighted by the Scientific American 50 Awards “have the potential to contribute much more to human health, consumer electronics and numerous other fields than if they were simply offering another antidepressant that tweaked serotonin levels or ratcheting up the speed of a microprocessor. What they have done is decidedly new,” the article adds.