Warren Alpert 2026 Banner

From Discovery to Therapy: Gene-Based Treatments for Sickle Cell Disease and Beta-Thalassemia

The Warren Alpert Foundation and Harvard Medical School invite you to our annual scientific symposium, recognizing five scientists for enabling curative genetic therapies for two major hemoglobin disorders: sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. In rigorous studies spanning two decades, they discovered how to reactivate the production of fetal hemoglobin in adults and optimized hematopoietic cell reconstitution procedures, thereby bringing molecularly based therapies to patients.

Thursday, October 1
1:30 p.m. 

Veritas Science Center
Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
Boston, Massachusetts 

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

IN HONOR OF
  • Daniel E. Bauer, MD, PhD
    Donald S. Fredrickson, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
    Director of the Gene Therapy Program, Boston Children’s Hospital
  • Stuart H. Orkin, MD ’72
    David G. Nathan Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
    Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  • Vijay G. Sankaran, PhD ’09, MD ’10
    Jan Ellen Paradise, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
    Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  • Swee Lay Thein, MD
    Senior Investigator and Chief of the Sickle Cell Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health
  • John Tisdale, MD
    Senior Investigator and Chief of the Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health 
FEATURING 

Jennifer Doudna, PhD ’89
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Founder, Innovative Genomics Institute

MODERATED BY

Edward Benz Jr., MD ’73
President and CEO Emeritus, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Richard and Susan Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

For more information, please contact Caitlin Craig at hms_events@hms.harvard.edu.