William Kaelin Jr. elected to Lilly Board of Directors

The Board of Directors of Eli Lilly and Company has elected William G. Kaelin Jr., M.D. as a new member, effective June 4, 2012. Dr. Kaelin, 54, is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Senior Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Associate Director, Basic Science, at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. As a member of Lilly’s board, Dr. Kaelin will serve on the science and technology committee and the finance committee. He will serve under interim election to fill a vacancy left by the retirement of Dr. Martin Feldstein and will stand for election by Lilly shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in May, 2014.

“I am very pleased to welcome Dr. Bill Kaelin to the Lilly board. Dr. Kaelin’s deep scientific knowledge and medical expertise will benefit Lilly shareholders and the patients who depend on us,” commented John Lechleiter, Ph.D., Lilly chairman, president and chief executive officer. “Bill is a leading cancer researcher and has a clear appreciation of the importance of scientific research and of Lilly’s commitment to the discovery and development of innovative medicines that make a difference for patients.”

Dr. Kaelin received his medical degree from Duke University in 1982 and was a house officer in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He went on to become a medical oncology clinical fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston, where he began his studies of tumor suppressor proteins. He became an independent investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1992 as a James S. McDonnell Scholar and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1998.

Dr. Kaelin’s research interests have focused on tumor suppressor genes and the normal functions of the proteins they encode. The long-term goal of his work is to lay the foundation for the development of new anticancer therapies based on the functions of specific tumor suppressor proteins. His studies of tumor suppressor genes linked to hereditary forms of cancer have uncovered molecular pathways that are important in non-hereditary cancers and have accelerated the development of new treatments for kidney cancer.

Dr. Kaelin is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences and has served on numerous boards and committees, including the American Association for Cancer Research’s Board of Directors and the National Cancer Institute Board of Scientific Advisors. He has received many awards for his work, including the Canada Gairdner International Prize, the AACR-Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Prize for Cancer Research, and the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Most recently, he was named co-recipient of the Scientific Grand Prize 2012 of the Lefoulon-Delalande Foundation.