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Innovation Week, the annual celebration of ���ϳԹ���’s innovative and entrepreneurial spirit, kicks off on Monday, Oct. 28.

Among the festivities will be the honoring of this year’s Faculty Distinguished Research Award winners. Established in 2013, the award is given annually to faculty members who have made outstanding contributions on a grand scale through their research. It is among the top honors bestowed upon faculty at ���ϳԹ���.

This year’s winners are Karen Beckwith, Daniela Calvetti and School of Medicine Professor Paul Tesar.

Paul Tesar

Director, Institute for Glial Sciences, School of Medicine
Professor, Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences, School of Medicine
Professor, Department of Neurosciences, School of Medicine
Dr. Donald and Ruth Weber Goodman Professor of Innovative Therapeutics, Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences, School of Medicine
Member, Cancer Genomics and Epigenomics Program, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center

Since his first experience conducting research as an undergraduate at ���ϳԹ���, Paul Tesar was hooked. He knew he wanted to spend his life in a lab working on science that could potentially help patients.

Now a professor in the Departments of Neurosciences and Genetics and Genome Sciences at the School of Medicine, Tesar is focused on regenerative therapies for patients with neurological disorders.

Research in the field often looks at nerve cells, but his team takes a different approach. They focus on glial cells, which make up about half of the nervous system and support nerve cells in ensuring proper neurological function. And they do it well—they are at the forefront of research into glial cell dysfunction and its role in human neurological diseases. 

In particular, the team has focused on one specialized glial cell type called oligodendrocytes, which produce the protective myelin sheaths around nerve cells. These cells are lost or destroyed in diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) or, in other cases, don’t form properly due to certain genetic mutations.

“We’ve made a lot of headway into people understanding that the oligodendrocytes themselves could be dysfunctional, and that dysfunction in an oligodendrocyte could actually be the driver or a major contributor to disease,” Tesar explained. “And I think most importantly that you could target therapy at an oligodendrocyte and fix it.”

Their work has led to the discovery of two novel classes of medicines: a remyelination therapy for multiple sclerosis, which the university licensed to , a Cleveland-based biotechnology Tesar co-founded; and an antisense oligonucleotide therapy for a rare neurological disorder called Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, which was licensed to  and is now being tested in patients in a clinical trial.

Building upon the success of this approach, Tesar is now the director of the Institute for Glial Sciences, which was created to focus on new methods for studying glial cells across three nervous systems: the central, peripheral and enteric.

“It’s founded on these same principles, but has expanded our purview to try to be a world leader on understanding the development, understanding the disease biology, and targeting glial cells with purposeful therapy across the whole spectrum of different glial cells,” Tesar said.

then explore the Innovation Week schedule and register for events.