Helen Hobbs
Helen Haskell Hobbs is an American medical researcher who is professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, who won a 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2018 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. Hobbs specializes in the dysregulation of lipid metabolism and how it affects human diseases. She and Jonathan C. Cohen found that people with hypomorphic PCSK9 mutations had lower LDL-cholesterol levels and were almost immune to heart disease. This finding led to the development of a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that mimic the effects of the PCSK9 mutations. She and Cohen also identified the first genetic risk factor for fatty liver disease, a burgeoning health problem that can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Their laboratory has shown that mutation in PNPLA3 causes accumulation of PNPLA3 on lipid droplets, which compromises the mobilization of triglycerides from liver cells. She sits on the Board of Directors at Pfizer.
Education
Hobbs graduated from Stanford University and went to medical school at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She completed an internship in internal medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she met her future husband, a Texan who trained at UT Southwestern. Together, Hobbs and her husband, Dr. Dennis Stone, moved to Dallas, Texas in 1980, where she completed her medical training at Parkland Memorial Hospital, including a one-year stint as chief resident.Following the advice of Donald Seldin, the chairman of medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, she chose to pursue research after residency. Again, following Dr. Seldin's recommendation, Hobbs took a research post-doctoral position studying lipoproteins at UT Southwestern in the laboratory of Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein, Nobel Prize in Medicine winners in 1985.