The Rosalind Kornfeld Award for Lifetime Achievement in Glycobiology was established in 2008 to honor the distinguished scientific career of Dr. Rosalind Kornfeld, as well as her outstanding service to the Society. This award is given by the Society to scientists who have, over their professional lifetimes, made significant contributions with important impact on the field and is presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society. In 2021, the society honored two colleagues with this prestigious award.

2024 Awardee - Dr. Rita Gerardy-Schahn

The winner of the 2024 Rosalind Kornfeld Lifetime Achievement Award is Dr. Rita Gerardy-Schahn, who recently became Professor Emeritus at the Hannover Medical School.

Rita studied biochemistry at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. She received her diploma in 1985 and joined the laboratory of Dieter Bitter-Suermann, Institute of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, for her doctoral thesis, which she completed in January 1989. While working on the kinetic and functional characterization of the guinea pig anaphylatoxin receptor for C3a, Rita experienced a stimulating "glycoatmosphere" in the Bitter-Suermann team, where the production of monoclonal antibodies against bacterial capsular polysaccharides (CPS) was the focus of research activities. In 1985, the Bitter-Suermann laboratory succeeded in generating the famous monoclonal antibody 735 (mab 735), which specifically recognizes the CPS of group B meningococci. This CPS consists of chains of sialic acid (polysialic acid, polySia) in alpha-2,8-linkage. Indeed, mab 735 became the key tool for Rita’s work when she started her second postdoc position at Hannover Medical School in 1990, again with Dieter Bitter-Suermann as mentor.

By that time, other laboratories, most notably Jukka Finne’s, had shown polySia also occurs in vertebrates (including humans), where it forms an extended post-translational modification of the neuronal cell adhesion molecule NCAM. However, nothing was known about vertebrate polysialyltransferase (polyST), the enzyme responsible for polySia biosynthesis. Rita was given the task of identifying this enzyme in a mammalian species. With little knowledge of molecular cloning techniques, she benefited from the stimulating company of immunologists. On the advice of her colleagues, she decided to start the search for a mammalian polyST using a complementation cloning strategy in CHO cells. In a productive team with her technician Andrea Bethe and two very talented students, Matthias Eckhardt and Martina Mühlenhoff, she succeeded in cloning the first mammalian polyST. The study was published in Nature in 1995. Intrigued by the "simplicity" of the cloning approach, other well-characterized CHO mutants with impaired polysialylation were used in the same way. In quick succession, the CMP-sialic acid transporter, the UDP-galactose transporter and the CMP sialic acid synthetase were expression cloned by complementing respective mutations in the CHO mutants Lec2, Lec8 and Lec32. All rescuing cDNAs were characterized at the molecular and biochemical levels and mutant mouse models were generated. The work expanded exponentially and Rita’s team established close contacts with renowned glycoscientists. In addition, the established importance of polySia in brain development brought her into close contact with groups working in neurobiology. Importantly, with these collaborators Rita’s group characterized brain defects in mice lacking ST8SIA2 and ST8SIA4 and showed that brain defects in the double knockout are rescued by the additional removal of NCAM, their major glycoprotein substrate.

Rita received offers from other German universities (Hamburg in 2000, Bielefeld in 2005), but thanks to retention negotiations she stayed at MHH, where she was promoted to Director of the Institute of Cellular Chemistry (later Clinical Biochemistry). Now she was able to expand her group to eight (and after 2017 to 19) faculty members. All were entitled to pursue independent projects and most decided to continue their successful PhD thesis work. Rita returned to her roots and continued to expand the toolbox of polySia-specific reagents. With the aid of a small team, Rita has established a biotechnologically relevant platform by developing bacterial capsule polymerases into enzymes with scalable product spectra. A platform that enables the enzyme-catalyzed production of polySia chains with a defined degree of polymerization (DP) is now well developed. Testing these fragments provided initial evidence that the polySia dispersity present in the natural system is associated with several functions. In a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, fragments of DP10 and DP12 were shown to effectively restore memory functions, while DP24 is the minimal polySia chain required to inhibit microglial inflammation and induce remyelination. Current investigations of Rita’s team revolve around the use of polySia DPs as therapeutics as well as the search for ways to target these drugs in the body.