Dr. Yael Mosse will receive first Nachman Award in Pediatric Oncology at national conference

Yaël P. Mossé, M.D., who cares for patients with cancer at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, will receive the inaugural James B. Nachman ASCO Junior Faculty Award in Pediatric Oncology. The American Society of Clinical Oncology will honor Dr. Mossé with this special merit award during its annual meeting, occurring June 1-5 in Chicago.

The new award honors the legacy of Dr. James B. Nachman, a pediatric oncologist and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Nachman died unexpectedly in 2011 while on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon with adolescents and young adults who had been under his treatment for cancer.

The Nachman Award committee chose Dr. Mossé in recognition of outstanding research that she will present at the ASCO meeting next month. A clinician and researcher with a special focus on the childhood cancer neuroblastoma, Dr. Mossé has helped achieve groundbreaking advances in treatment of this disease. In 2008 she led a research team at Children's Hospital that discovered mutations in a gene that occurs in 10 to 15 percent of neuroblastoma cases. That scientific finding provided the impetus for a national clinical trial, currently in progress, of a new drug treatment for neuroblastoma.

Dr. Mossé received her M.D. from the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1997, joining The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia residency program that year, followed by fellowship training at the same hospital starting in 2000. She became an attending oncologist at Children's Hospital in 2003 and is also an assistant professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania.

Provided by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia