Please join us in congratulating SRF Scientific Advisor, Dan Kastner, MD, PhD, who has been awarded this year’s Crafoord Prize in Polyarthritis by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He receives the prize for discovering and elucidating the characteristics of a class of diseases called autoinflammatory diseases.
The Crafoord Prize is one of the major international science prizes. Its subject areas complement the Nobel Prizes and rotate from year to year. It is considered to be a complement to—and for some researchers a precursor to—a Nobel Prize.
“What Dr. Kastner has accomplished is absolutely groundbreaking. The concept of autoinflammatory disorders didn’t exist before he identified the cause behind a number of them,” said Olle Kämpe, a professor of clinical endocrinology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. She is a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and chair of the Prize Committee.
Through Dr. Kastner’s tenure at the NIH, where he is currently Scientific Chief of the Intramural Division of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), he has identified 16 autoinflammatory genetic disorders and found effective treatments for at least 12 of them, establishing a whole new field of medicine.
