Garret FitzGerald, MD, FRS, professor of Medicine and Pharmacology; chair of the Department of Pharmacology; and director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania is the 2013 recipient of the Jay and Jeanine Schottenstein Prize in Cardiovascular Sciences from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Heart and Vascular Center.

The Schottenstein Prize, established with a $2 million gift from philanthropists Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein, is awarded to an international leader in the clinical sciences of cardiovascular medicine, cardiothoracic surgery, or the basic sciences of molecular or cellular cardiology. With the gift, the Schottenstein Laureate receives an honorarium of at least $100,000. FitzGerald will receive the award, one of the largest in the field, during a ceremony in Columbus on Oct 2.

“I am honored to receive this prize, which reflects on the dedication and hard work of so many people with whom I’ve been privileged to work and collaborate,” says FitzGerald.

His research takes an integrative approach to elucidating the mechanisms of drug action, drawing on work in cells, model organisms, and humans. His work contributed substantially to the development of low-dose aspirin for cardioprotection. His team discovered how lower doses of aspirin than had been previously used to treat pain and inflammation act on blood cells called platelets to shut down their role in blocking arteries to cause heart attacks and strokes. Low-dose aspirin is now used for this purpose throughout the world and has saved the lives of tens of millions of people. His group was also the first to predict and then mechanistically explain the cardiovascular hazard from nonsteroidal antinflammatory drugs - NSAIDs. Between his work on aspirin and NSAIDs, he has benefited ten, if not hundreds, of millions of patients worldwide. His laboratory also described the first molecular clock in the cardiovascular system.

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