A professor of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard Medical School will present a seminar on Photodynamic Therapy for faculty of the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the Karmanos Cancer Institute.

Tayyaba Hasan, Ph.D., a professor of Dermatology at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine and director of the Office of Research Career Development at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, will present "Photodynamic Therapy: A Translational Bridge Between Chemistry and Medicine."  Photodynamic therapy, according to one of Dr. Hasan's publications, is a treatment for the destruction of cancerous and non-neoplastic pathologies that involves the simultaneous presence of light, oxygen and a light-activatable chemical called a photosensitizer that creates a cytotoxic effect.

The May 21 seminar is a joint presentation by the School of Medicine's Department of Pharmacology and the Karmanos Cancer Institute.

Dr. Hasan's research focuses on the application of photochemistry-based approaches to biomedical problems and has both basic and translational components. Studies from her laboratory on photodynamic activation of porphyrins have led to a Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly in the western world. The work led to her receiving the Pioneers in Biomedical Optics for Bench to Bedside Translation Award from the National Institute of Health in 2009.

She is the program director of a National Cancer Institute-funded multi-center program project grant studying biophysical and photochemical approaches to cancer therapy.

She has served on review panels of funding agencies for the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense and the American Cancer Society. She is a reviewer for the Canadian, several European and Singaporean National Research Councils. She serves on advisory boards of a number of commercial and academic entities, and is president-elect of the American Society for Photobiology.

Dr. Hasan is the founding director of the Office for Research and Career Development at Massachusetts General Hospital. She was recently acknowledged for her mentoring efforts with the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School.

The seminar will take place at 11 a.m. in the Wertz Auditorium at the Karmanos Cancer Institute.