Richard Kremer

Biography

Dr. Richard Kremer is currently Professor and Director of the Bone and Mineral Unit in the Department of Medicine of McGill University. He is also the co-leader of the Musculoskeletal Axis of the McGill University Health Centre. Born in Paris, Dr Kremer received his MD (1977) and Ph.D. (1979) degrees at the Pierre et Marie Curie University of Paris, and completed his internal medicine and endocrinology residency at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He then moved to Canada and completed his residency training at the Montreal General Hospital, Royal Victoria and Ottawa Civic Hospitals. He pursued his research training at the Royal Victoria Hospital and joined the Division of Endocrinology as a full-time physician-scientist in 1989. Dr. Kremer is the recipient of several prizes and awards including the Chercheur National award from the Fonds de Recherches en Santé du Québec. He has made significant contributions to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Cancer Research Institute (NCI) on grant and award committees. He is a reviewer and sits on the Editorial Board for several international journals and is a consultant to industry, academic and lay organizations in his capacity as a clinician scientist and expert in metabolic bone diseases.

Research Interest

Over the past 20 years research in my laboratory has focused on the role of calcium regulating hormones in health and disease. First, my laboratory is trying to elucidate how 1, 25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 1, 25(OH) 2D3, the active form of vitamin D, influences cell growth and differentiation in the skeleton and in cancer cells. An extension of these studies is to elaborate new therapeutic strategies with vitamin D derivatives in osteoporosis and in cancer. For this purpose we developed animal models to study the efficacy of vitamin D and its analogs in models of osteoporosis and cancer. In collaboration with colleagues in Australia and in the US we discovered that a lack of vitamin D results in fat accumulation in bone and muscle with deleterious consequences for the musculoskeletal system. We also reported that a lack of vitamin D leads to accelerated development of breast cancer. Another major focus of our research activities has been to establish the role of parathyroid hormone related protein (PTHrP) in tumor initiation, growth and metastasis This has led to the development of a novel targeted therapy against breast cancer using monoclonal antibodies raised against PTHrP. Finally, a recent focus of our research activities has been to elucidate the role of circulating tumor cells in breast cancer progression in view of identifying specific markers of skeletal metastasis in breast and prostate cancer. The goal of these studies is to develop targeted therapies in cancer based on the unique profile of cancer cells that are refractory to most chemotherapeutic interventions.