Media Contact: Barry Zepel
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LOS ANGELES, CA (May 11, 2000) -- David B. Agus, M.D., a nationally-recognized cancer researcher and clinician who headed the Laboratory of Tumor Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, has joined the medical staff of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles as research director of its new Prostate Cancer Institute.

"David Agus is a brilliant researcher, and we are extremely pleased that he has accepted our invitation to join the elite Cedars-Sinai medical team," said Glenn D. Braunstein, M.D., chairman of the Department of Medicine. "The contributions he is making to the understanding of cancer biology and the development of new drugs to treat cancer will benefit patients everywhere."

Dr. Agus has been responsible for advancing the understanding of prostate cancer biology and the development of clinical trials to test new drugs for the treatment of both prostate cancer and lymphoma. Of particular note are his discoveries concerning the manner in which prostate cancer cells respond to androgen withdrawal and development of several new drugs to target molecular abnormalities in various cancers.

In addition to his work as an attending physician in the Department of Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Agus was concurrently an assistant professor of Medicine at Cornell University Medical Center, also in New York. He has authored and co-authored numerous medical research papers and publications.

Among Dr. Agus' many honors are the American Cancer Society Physician Research Training Award, a Clinical Scholar Award from the Sloan-Kettering Institute, a CaP CURE Young Investigator Award, and the American Cancer Society Clinical Oncology Fellowship Award.

The Baltimore, MD, native received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1987 and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1992. He then spent two years at the National Institutes of Health as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-NIH Research Scholar. He completed his medical internship and residency training as part of the Osler housestaff at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and fulfilled his oncology fellowship training at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Agus, his wife Amy, their daughter Sydney, and son Miles, reside in the Los Angeles area.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is one of the largest and finest non-profit hospitals in the Western United States. For the fifth straight two-year period, Cedars-Sinai has been named Southern California's gold standard in healthcare in an independent survey. Cedars-Sinai is internationally renowned for its diagnostic and treatment capabilities and its broad spectrum of programs and services, as well as breakthrough biomedical research and superlative medical education. The medical center ranks among the top 12 non-university hospitals in the nation for its research activities.

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