Louis P. “Pepper” Dehner, M.D., received the Distinguished Pathologist Award of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP) at the academy’s 2009 annual meeting in March. The Distinguished Pathologist Award is its highest honor.
Dehner, professor of pathology and immunology and professor of pathology in pediatrics, is renowned for his skills as a surgical pathologist and for his work in diagnosing childhood tumors.
Thanks to the groundwork laid by Dehner, physicians are working to improve survival rates of pleuropulmonary blastoma (PPB), a rare childhood cancer that leads to formation of lung tumors in the first five years of life and also can cause brain cancer and other tumors, by increasing early diagnosis. The disorder is now being characterized at the molecular and genetic level via an international PPB family registry that Dehner helped create with Jack Priest, M.D., a pediatric hematologist-oncologist in St. Paul, Minn.