Rubin, Wu, and Allegretti Named Sherman Prize Winners

For their excellence in advancing treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), 3 highly respected gastroenterologists—David T. Rubin, MD; Gary D. Wu, MD; and Jessica Allegretti, MD— have been chosen as winners of the 2020 Sherman Prize, the Bruce and Cynthia Sherman Charitable Foundation announced.

David T. Rubin, MD, FACG, AGAF, FACP, FASGE, FRCP (Edinburgh), is the Joseph B. Kirsner professor of medicine; chief of the section of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition; and codirector of the Digestive Diseases Center at the University of Chicago School of Medicine. In its announcement, the Sherman Prize stated that Dr Rubin is “renowned in the IBD community as a brilliant clinician, creative researcher, tireless advocate, and trailblazing educator.”

Dr Rubin has been awarded a $100,000 Sherman Prize “for his unwavering dedication to advancing the field and his fierce advocacy to protect and promote patients’ access to optimal care, ambitions that harken back to his fellowship in clinical medical ethics.” He is also credited for research that demonstrated inflammation as a risk factor for colorectal cancer in patients with IBD, which “has made a profound impact on treatment goals.”

Gary D. Wu, MD, is the Ferdinand G. Weisbrod professor in gastroenterology and director of the Penn Center for Nutritional Science and Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the  University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The Sherman Prize award announcement credited Dr Wu with pioneering “the study of the gut microbiome in IBD, publishing seminal research on the relationship between diet and the microbiome—enabling multiple areas of research into dietary interventions for IBD. Today, he continues to push the boundaries of this research to unravel the mechanisms by which food and nutrition can cause, prevent, or treat Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.”

Dr Wu received the $100,000 Sherman Prize for “bringing together multidisciplinary research teams to translate his innovative wet bench research findings into novel treatment approaches. He leads this team of innovators at the Penn Center for Nutritional Science and Medicine, where they study how the underlying biology of the food we eat ultimately affects our health.”

Jessica R. Allegretti, MD, MPH, associate director of the Crohn's and Colitis Center and director of the Fecal Microbiota Transplant Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, has been awarded the $25,000 Sherman Emerging Leader Prize for her leadership in fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) and microbiome therapeutics, establishing the therapy as an effective treatment in patients with IBD who present with recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection.

The Sherman Prize acknowledged Dr Allegretti “for her commitment to these vulnerable, poorly understood and difficult-to-treat patients, building a world-class FMT program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and teaching other institutions how to do the same.”

—Rebecca Mashaw