Spotlight on Dr. Martin Lipkin

Dr. Martin Lipkin, Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and Director of Clinical Research at Strang Cancer Prevention Center, has developed numerous research programs in the field of cancer etiology and prevention. Dr. Lipkin is one of the true pioneers in the study of chemoprevention of cancer, particularly colon cancer, and his cell culture and animal models have provided the opportunity to study chemopreventive agents before they are tested in human populations.

His group was one of the first to measure cell proliferation kinetics in human subjects, defining the kinetics of replication and turnover of epithelial cells in all areas of the human gastrointestinal tract. During these studies, Dr. Lipkin and his colleagues found that cancer-prone epithelial cells in human subjects failed to suppress DNA synthesis during cell differentiation, a finding he expanded to evolve the first model of colonic tumorigenesis containing an accumulation of errors of proliferation and differentiation in epithelial cells. This model was later extended by other investigators to include mutational and related cell-cycle regulating events.

He carried out the first study in human subjects demonstrating that increased dietary calcium was a potential chemopreventive agent for the prevention of human colon cancer. That finding was recently confirmed in a large National Cancer Institute multicenter study, which verified that supplemental dietary calcium did indeed inhibit the recurrence of colonic adenomas, the precursors of human colon cancer. His current research program includes continuation of both pre-clinical and clinical cancer chemoprevention studies of calcium, vitamin D and other new agents carried out at the institutions noted above and at The Rockefeller University Hospital.