Year of birth: 1945

Wikipedia

BIOGRAPHY

Laurent Degos is a French haematologist at Hôpital Saint-Louis, Paris, whose work on differentiation therapy transformed the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL). Together with Christine Chomienne and Sylvie Castaigne, he demonstrated in 1990 that all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) could induce complete remissions in APL patients harbouring the PML-RARA fusion, converting the most lethal subtype of AML into the most curable. This was the first successful “targeted” therapy in leukaemia, predating imatinib by a decade, and became an enduring paradigm of translational medicine.