Dr. Honn Memorium
Kenneth Vaughn Honn, Ph.D.
Feb. 10, 1946 – May 9, 2023
A native of Detroit, Dr. Honn was a proud alumnus of De La Salle Collegiate High School, Class of 1963. He received his doctoral degree in endocrinology from WSU in 1977. Following graduate training, he was hired as an assistant professor of Radiology. Four years later, he was promoted to associate professor of Radiology and Radiation Oncology, and was promoted to professor in 1984 and awarded the title of Distinguished Professor in 2004.
He wrote more than 360 published works and received a citation from the WSU Board of Governors as the most cited scholar at WSU. With more than 40 years of experience in the fields of cancer, inflammation and bioactive lipids, Dr. Honn and his laboratory focused on bioactive lipids and integrin receptors and the role they play in various aspects of tumor progression, cell growth and apoptosis, angiogenesis and tumor cell matrix interactions. His lab lab concentrated on lipoxygenases, and in particular 12-lipoxygenase and its metabolic product 12(S)-HETE. Research efforts in Dr. Honn’s laboratory directly led to six clinical trials. He held 17 U.S. patents, seven of which are based on the generation of novel chemotherapeutic/radiation sensitizing compounds. He received more than 50 grants totaling in excess of $25 million.
In addition to directing his own research, he reviewed grants for the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Department of Defense; provided consultation to pharmaceutical companies; served on the editorial board of 11 scientific journals; and served as co-editor-in-chief of Springer Nature’s Cancer and Metastasis Reviews, alongside Avraham Raz, Ph.D. Under their leadership, the review journal rose to the rank of 32 of 240 oncology journals.
Dr. Honn was the director of the Bioactive Lipids Research Program and was a member of the Cancer Biology Graduate Program and the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute. He was a founding member and president of the Eicosanoid Research Foundation and chairman of the International Conference on Bioactive Lipids in Cancer, Inflammation and Related Diseases, a bi-annual international conference he initiated in 1989 in Detroit.
Dr. Honn was an exceptional scientist making important contributions to medical science and is both nationally and internationally recognized for his highly innovative and creative research. He discovered, in a major contribution in the early 1980s, that prostacyclin, a lipid mediator, plays an important role in tumor metastasis. This groundbreaking discovery opened the opportunity to investigate the role of bioactive lipids in cancer and biology, and in practice. Dr. Honn is also internationally known for his discoveries of the role of bioactive lipids in prostate cancer. He and the members of his research team were the first to identify the 12-HETE receptor, which plays an important role in vascular medicine and tumorigenesis. His discoveries have been followed by many and have given rise to the area of lipid mediators and their role in cancer. In addition to his research on bioactive lipids in tumor progression, he collaborated with scientists at the Perinatology Research Branch of the National Institutes of Health studying the role of lipids in human parturition, in particular, their role in preterm labor and term labor.
The rigor and importance of the contributions of Dr. Honn over almost four decades have significantly advanced the discipline of bioactive lipid mediators, which have opened the potential for new therapeutic approaches in cancer and tumor metastasis. He accomplished all of his seminal discoveries and published this work as a WSU faculty member.
In 2014, Dr. Honn was the recipient of the Lawrence M. Weiner Award, honoring the outstanding contributions made by non-M.D. alumni of the Wayne State University School of Medicine. In 2015, he received the Notable Alumni Recognition Award. In 2018 he was the recipient of the Chancellors Award at Louisiana State University as well as the WSU Outstanding Researcher Award at WSU.
Dr. Honn is remembered by family, friends, colleagues and students as a leader, mentor and friend to all. He was a well-respected and considered to be tough leader who molded young researchers to become successful independent investigators.