Angelika Amon was a world-renowned scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, who made seminal contributions to cell biology.
In 2000, Angelika Amon received an HFSP research grant and this year, she was awarded the HFSP Nakasone Award for ‘discovering aneuploidy-induced cellular changes and their contribution to tumorigenesis’, which paved the way for exploiting aneuploidy as a therapeutic target in cancer treatment. Her work has defined the field and provided the theoretical foundation for novel therapeutics that can specifically kill cells that experience proteotoxic stress.