Dennis Joseph Slamon (born August 6, 1948),[1][2] is an American oncologist and chief of the division of Hematology-Oncology at UCLA.
[5] A 1975 honors graduate of the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, Slamon earned his Ph.D. in cell biology that same year.
In 1986 Axel Ullrich, a German scientist working at Genentech, first discovered the Her-2 protein and gave a conference about it in which Slamon was present.
They took breast cancer cells and mimicked what was happening in their patients, looking at genetic alterations in the genes that regulate growth.
Slamon's group found that when they added an antibody to the receptor that the gene made when it mutated, the tumor growth rate dropped dramatically.