Personal Statement

Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, FRCP, MACP, is co-director of the Pituitary Center, professor of medicine in the Endocrinology Division and dean of the medical faculty at Cedars-Sinai.

The Melmed Laboratory focuses on pathogenesis and treatment of pituitary tumors, integrating basic science discovery with prospective clinical study of patients with pituitary disease. The clinical and translational training in the Pituitary Center and Melmed Laboratory are ideal nurturing environments for scholarly creativity in pituitary medicine. Many of the more than 70 pre- and postdoctoral scientists trained in the Pituitary Center now occupy leadership positions in academic endocrinology in the U.S. and worldwide.

The team publishes regularly in the highest quality basic and clinical journals, maintaining scholarly contributions at the forefront of discovery in pituitary medicine. Fundamental discovery achievements include elucidating intrapituitary signaling mechanisms underlying excess tumor-derived growth hormone, adrenocorticotrophic hormone, or prolactin secretion; identifying novel subcellular therapeutic targets for drug identification and application in clinical trials; and understanding the relationship between tumor cell proliferation and hormone hypersecretion. These findings are applied to understanding cell cycle mechanisms critical to the rare transformation of these invariably benign adenomas to malignancy. The group couples these translational discoveries with developing clinical guidelines, pivotal investigator-initiated clinical trials, and original disease classification to advance pituitary medicine.