Helen Haskell Hobbs (born May 5, 1952 in

Boston, Massachusetts Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

) is an American medical researcher who is professor at the

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern or UTSW) is a public academic health science center in Dallas, Texas. With approximately 23,000 employees, more than 3,000 full-time faculty, and nearly 4 million outpatient ...

, and a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American busin ...

Investigator, who won a 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2018 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. She and Jonathan C. Cohen found that people with hypomorphic

PCSK9 Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) is an enzyme encoded by the ''PCSK9'' gene in humans on chromosome 1. It is the 9th member of the proprotein convertase family of proteins that activate other proteins. Similar genes ( orth ...

mutations had lower LDL-cholesterol levels and were almost immune to heart disease. This finding led to the development of a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that mimic the effects of the PCSK9 mutations. She and Cohen also identified the first genetic risk factor for fatty liver disease, a burgeoning health problem that can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Their laboratory has shown that mutation in PNPLA3 causes accumulation of PNPLA3 on lipid droplets, which compromises the mobilization of triglycerides from liver cells. She sits on the Board of Directors at

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Education

Hobbs graduated from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and went to medical school at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She completed an internship in internal medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she met her future husband, a Texan who trained at UT Southwestern. Together, Hobbs and her husband, Dr. Dennis Stone, moved to Dallas, Texas in 1980, where she completed her medical training at Parkland Memorial Hospital, including a one-year stint as chief resident. Following the advice of Donald Seldin, the chairman of medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, she chose to pursue research after residency. Again, following Dr. Seldin's recommendation, Hobbs took a research post-doctoral position studying

lipoproteins A lipoprotein is a biochemical assembly whose primary function is to transport hydrophobic lipid (also known as fat) molecules in water, as in blood plasma or other extracellular fluids. They consist of a triglyceride and cholesterol center, sur ...

at UT Southwestern in the laboratory of Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein,

Nobel Prize in Medicine The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine () is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single ...

winners in 1985.

Research

In 1987 Hobbs joined the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center where she is the Eugene McDermott Distinguished Chair for the Study of Human Growth and Development. In 1999, she co-founded the Dallas Heart Study with a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. This study takes genetic samples of a representative segment of the population of Dallas County, and correlates them to the subject's health metrics. Through this study, she found that variations in the gene PCSK9 led to lower plasma cholesterol and protection from cardiovascular disease. Another major focus of her career is to understand the basis of fatty liver disease. She and Jonathan Cohen have shown that variations in the DNA sequences of PNPLA3 and TM6SF2 confer susceptibility to fatty liver disease, soon to be the number one indication for liver transplantation.

Awards

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hobbs, Helen 1952 births Living people University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center faculty Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Stanford University alumni Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine alumni Members of the National Academy of Medicine