Jan Leslie Breslow (born 1943)[1][2] is an American physician and medical researcher who studies atherosclerosis. As of 2017, he is Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professor at Rockefeller University and directs the university's Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism.
In 1973, he took up a post as head of the metabolism division of Boston Children's Hospital, as well as successively instructor, assistant and associate professor in pediatric medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 1984, he moved to Rockefeller University as a professor, and in 1986, was appointed Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professor at the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism.[1][3] In 2014, he was appointed director of the university's Sackler Center for Biomedicine and Nutrition.[3] He also works at Rockefeller University Hospital as a senior physician and was physician-in-chief in the 1990s.[1][3]
Research
Breslow's research has focused on the genetic factors that govern an individual's predisposition to develop atherosclerosis.[4] He started to work on the genetics of cholesterol handling in the late 1970s,[5] and in the early 1980s, with Vassilis Zannis, he was one of the earliest to dissect the different variants of human apolipoprotein E (ApoE), a component of very low-density lipoprotein.[6] People with different ApoE variants are now known to have different risks not only of heart disease but also of Alzheimer's disease.[4] In 1992, his group found that deleting the mouse gene for ApoE caused the animals to develop elevated blood cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis within around 6 months, on a normal diet.[7]Nobuyo Maeda's group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also independently created ApoE knockouts (apoe−/−) that developed atherosclerosis at the same time.[8][9][10] The ApoE knockout was the earliest mouse model of the disease, and has been widely used in atherosclerosis research.[10][11][12]
His group has subsequently researched other genes associated with atherosclerosis, and for example, in 2003, were among the first to identify and characterize PCSK9, which encodes an enzyme acting in a novel cholesterol regulatory pathway.[13]Antibodies targeting PCSK9 were approved by the US FDA as a novel class of cholesterol-lowering drugs in 2015.[14]
Breslow is married to Marilyn G. Breslow, an investment manager and sculptor; the couple have two sons.[18][19] Breslow is one of the signatories of a letter entitled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming", which was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2012.[20]
Andrew S. Plump; Jonathan D. Smith; Tony Hayek; Katriina Aalto-Setälä; Annemarie Walsh; Judy G. Verstuyft; Edward M. Rubin; Jan L. Breslow (1992), "Severe hypercholesterolemia and atherosclerosis in apolipoprotein E-deficient mice created by homologous recombination in ES cells", Cell, 71 (2): 343–53, doi:10.1016/0092-8674(92)90362-g, PMID1423598, S2CID29828640
Vassilis I. Zannis; Jan L. Breslow (1981), "Human very low density lipoprotein apolipoprotein E isoprotein polymorphism is explained by genetic variation and posttranslational modification", Biochemistry, 20 (4): 1033–41, doi:10.1021/bi00507a059, PMID6260135
^Andrew S. Plump; Jonathan D. Smith; Tony Hayek; Katriina Aalto-Setälä; Annemarie Walsh; Judy G. Verstuyft; Edward M. Rubin; Jan L. Breslow (1992), "Severe hypercholesterolemia and atherosclerosis in apolipoprotein E-deficient mice created by homologous recombination in ES cells", Cell, 71 (2): 343–53, doi:10.1016/0092-8674(92)90362-g, PMID1423598, S2CID29828640
^Fatemeh Ramezani Kapourchali; Gangadaran Surendiran; Li Chen; Elisabeth Uitz; Babak Bahadori; Mohammed H. Moghadasian (2014), "Animal models of atherosclerosis", World Journal of Clinical Cases, 2 (5): 126–32, doi:10.12998/wjcc.v2.i5.126, PMC4023305, PMID24868511
^Stewart C. Whitman (2004), "A practical approach to using mice in atherosclerosis research", The Clinical Biochemist Reviews, 25 (1): 81–93, PMC1853358, PMID18516202
