Richard D. Cummings is an American biochemist who is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He also the chief of the division of surgical sciences within the department of surgery. He is the director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Glycoscience, director of the National Center for Functional Glycomics, and also founder of the Glycomics Core at BIDMC. As of 2018 Cummings is also the scientific director of the Feihi Nutrition Laboratory at BIDMC. Before moving to BIDMC/HMS, Cummings was the William Patterson Timmie Professor and chair of the department of biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia from 2006 to 2015. At Emory, Cummings was a founder in 2007 of the Emory Glycomics Center.

Education

Cummings graduated from Isabella High School near Maplesville, Alabama, and received his B.S. in biology and chemistry from the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in biology (biochemistry) from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he trained with Stephen A. Roth, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the division of hematology/oncology at Washington University School of Medicine, where he trained with Stuart A. Kornfeld.

Career and research

Cummings was professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Georgia in Athens from 1983-1992 and associate director of the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center.

Cummings was the Ed Miller Endowed Chair in Molecular Biology, the George Lynn Cross Professor in Biochemistry, and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, College of Medicine, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma from 1992-2006. He was the founder in 1999 of the Oklahoma Center for Medical Glycobiology.

Cummings was a co-founder in 2002, along with Rodger P. McEver and Richard Alvarez, of Selexys Pharmaceuticals Corporation, where he initially served as president and chief scientific officer. Selexys was based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The emphasis of the company was in developing treatments for inflammatory disorders. On November 21, 2016, it was announced that Selexys was purchased by Novartis.^[1] The purchase occurred following receipt of results of the SUSTAIN study, a Phase II trial evaluating the use of SelG1, an anti-P-selectin antibody, in the reduction of vaso-occlusive pain crises in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD).^[2]

Cummings was also a co-founder in 2014 of Tetherex Pharmaceuticals, a spinoff of Selexys in Oklahoma City, that is developing novel first-in-class therapeutics targeting cell adhesion proteins in inflammatory and oncologic diseases. In 1988 he was a founder of ELA Technologies, Inc. in Athens, Georgia, that specialized in developing uses of bioluminescent proteins in high-sensitivity detection assays.

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