Caltech Biology Professor Receives Langley Award for Basic Research on Nicotine and Tobacco

Professor of Biology Henry Lester has been named the 2024 recipient of the Langley Award for Basic Research on Nicotine and Tobacco from the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco (SRNT). The Langley Award Honors scientists who have made groundbreaking advances in basic nicotine research in the areas of pharmacology, neuroscience, and/or genetics.

“Nicotine has served as a model for neuroscience and pharmacology ever since Columbus’s crew sampled tobacco,” says Lester. “Insights from nicotine help to explain psychiatric and addictive drugs, and nicotine addiction remains one of the best-studied psychiatric disorders.”

Lester’s Langley Award lecture, presented at the society’s annual meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, is titled, “Toward a Wearable Continuous Monitor for the Personal Pharmacokinetics of Nicotine.” The research is a collaboration with Wei Gao (assistant professor of medical engineering; Investigator, Heritage Medical Research Institute; Ronald and JoAnne Willens Scholar), Dennis Dougherty (George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry; Norman Davidson Leadership Chair, Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering), Stephen Mayo (PhD ’87, Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry; Merkin Institute Professor), Neal Benowitz of the UC San Francisco, and Ryan Drenan of Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Lester and his colleagues are developing a wearable monitor that could be worn for 24 hours while the wearer smokes or vapes as usual to determine how the wearer metabolizes nicotine. The team hopes to test the hypothesis that this knowledge will help the wearer to quit smoking.

In one version of the wearable nicotine monitor, a specially engineered protein called an intensity-based nicotine-sensing fluorescent reporter (iNicSnFR) will glow in proportion to the nicotine concentration in a person’s skin or sweat.

Lester has more than 330 publications and has received nine US patents. He also received the Fuller Award in Neuropharmacology from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the Cole Award in Membrane Biophysics from the Biophysical Society, for which he also served as president.

Lester has served as chair of the Caltech faculty. He now serves as option representative for neurobiology. He teaches Introduction to Neuroscience with Ralph Adolphs (PhD ’93, Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology), the Biology of Neural Diseases with Research Professor of Biology Carlos Lois, and Neuropharmacology.