Chevy Chase, MD, June 14, 2008 - The Endocrine Society is pleased to announce that P. Reed Larsen, M.D., is the 2008 recipient of its highest award—the Fred Conrad Koch Award. This award is presented annually to recognize exceptional contributions to endocrinology and includes a $25,000 honorarium. The Koch award will be presented to Dr. Larsen at ENDO 08, the 90th Annual Meeting of The Endocrine Society, which will take place from June 15-18, 2008, in San Francisco, California.

Dr. Larsen has been an exceptional leader and pioneer in the discovery of mechanisms involved in thyroid hormone action and metabolism and their implications for thyroid hormone homeostasis in health and disease. At the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, he set in motion a series of seminal discoveries that would resonate in the endocrinology field and beyond, including the mechanism by which T4 regulates TSH secretion, the identification and biochemical characterization of the type 2 deiodinase, its susceptibility to proteasomal degradation, and the tissue-specific regulation of T3 concentration by deiodinases. He is also honored for his identification of the mechanism by which eukaryotic cells cotranslationally incorporate selenocysteine. He established this after his group cloned the first member of the selenodeiodinase family. In addition, he developed methodology for, and with, colleagues at the Massachusetts Department of Health in 1976, implementing the New England Screening Program for Congenital Hypothyroidism, one of the first such programs in the United States to address the relatively common condition which causes irreversible mental retardation if untreated. More recently, he and his colleagues identifies the first infant with “consumptive hypothyroidism”, due to overexpression of the thyroid hormone-inactivating type 3 deiodinase in a hepatic hemangioma.

Dr. Larsen has been a member of the Harvard Medical School Faculty since 1974 and was appointed Professor of Medicine in 1982. He is also a member of The Endocrine Society, American Society for Clinical Investigation, American Thyroid Association, Association of American Physicians, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London. Dr. Larsen is co-Editor of Williams Textbook of Endocrinology and Editor-in-Chief of Nature Clinical Practice of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Recently, Dr. Larsen received the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School.

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Founded in 1916, The Endocrine Society is the world's oldest, largest, and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology. Today, The Endocrine Society's membership consists of over 14,000 scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in more than 80 countries. Together, these members represent all basic, applied, and clinical interests in endocrinology. The Endocrine Society is based in Chevy Chase, Md. To learn more about the Society, and the field of endocrinology, visit our web site at www.endo-society.org.