Boulder professor earns lifetime bioscience honors

Leslie Leinwand recently was honored with the Lifetime Achievement award by the Colorado BioScience Association for her contributions to Colorado's bioscience industry.

Leinwand, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the interim director of the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome and director of the Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology (CIMB).

Leinwand led the initiative to begin CIMB and foster cutting-edge research, teaching and technology development in life sciences, physical sciences, math, computational sciences and engineering. She also co-founded Myogen Inc., a successful university venture that was acquired by Gilead, a biopharmaceutical company. Following the acquisition, she began Hiberna Corp., a drug discovery company that is studying the Burmese python in order to develop treatments to combat cardiac hypertrophy, or an increased thickness of the heart muscle.