刘易斯·坎特利1949—

荣誉

2013年获生命科学突破奖。2015年获盖尔德纳国际奖。

Lewis Clayton Cantley (born February 20, 1949) is an American cell biologist and biochemist who has made significant advances to the understanding of cancer metabolism. Among his most notable contributions are the discovery and study of the enzyme PI-3-kinase, now known to be important to understanding cancer and diabetes mellitus. He was Meyer Director and Professor of Cancer Biology at the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He is a professor in the Departments of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Director of Cancer Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2016, he was elected Chairman of the Board for the Hope Funds for Cancer Research.

Biography

Cantley grew up in West Virginia, remaining there at Wesleyan College where he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry in 1971. Cantley obtained his PhD at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he worked with Gordon Hammes on enzyme kinetics, using FRET to study enzyme conformational changes. In 1975 he moved to Harvard University for a postdoctoral fellowship under Guido Guidotti, where he discovered that an impurity in commercial preparations of ATP, vanadate, acts as a transition state analog for phosphate hydrolysis. In 1978 Cantley became assistant professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard, being promoted to associate professor in 1981. In 1985, he became a full professor in physiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. In 1985 Cantley and colleagues Malcolm Whitman, David Kaplan, Tom Roberts, and Brian Schaffhausen made the seminal discovery of the existence of phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K).

Research

Discovery of PI-3-kinase and PtdIns(3,4)P2

In a series of studies spanning several years, Cantley and colleagues demonstrated that a kinase activity associated with the middle T oncoprotein is a phosphoinositide kinase, that it is a novel type of phosphoinositide kinase that phosphorylates the 3' position on the inositol ring, and that this phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI-3-kinase) is activated by growth factors to produce novel 3'-phosphorylated phosphoinositides, in particularly PtdIns(3,4,5)P3 that had previously been identified in physiologically stimulated human neutrophils. In subsequent years Cantley and colleagues identified critical aspects of the regulation of PI-3-kinase by growth factor receptors. Specifically, they discovered that the catalytic subunit p110 dimerizes with the regulatory subunit p85, and that the SH2 domain of p85 specifically recognized phosphotyrosines on growth factor receptors or adaptor proteins via the pY-X-X-M motif.

The Cantley lab has also made seminal contributions to understanding signaling downstream of PI-3-kinase.

Industrial activities

Lewis C. Cantley has been involved in numerous companies. Recent examples include the following:

Co-founder of Petra Pharma (with Nathanael Gray).

Co-founder of Agios Pharmaceuticals (with Tak Mak and Craig B. Thompson).

Co-founder of Volastra Therapeutics (with Sam Bakhoum and Olivier Elemento), developing treatments targeting chromosomal instability in cancer.

Co-founder of Marendis Therapeutics (with Tomer Yaron-Barir and Olivier Elemento), targeting drug resistance in cancer.

Awards, honors and media appearances

• Cantley has received numerous awards and honors, including:
• ASBMB Avanti Award for Lipid Research (1998)
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999)
• Heinrich Wieland Prize for Lipid Research (2000)
• Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2001)
• Caledonian Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2002)
• Pezcoller-AACR International Award for Cancer Research (2005)
• Rolf Luft Award of the Karolinska Institute (2009)
• Pasrow Prize for Cancer Research (2011)
• Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013)
• Jacobaeus Prize for Diabetes Research, from the Karolinska Institute (2013)
• Elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (2014)
• AACR Princess Takamatsu Memorial Lectureship (2015)
• Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine (2015)
• Canada Gairdner International Award (2015)
• Elected to European life sciences academy EMBO (2015)
• The Association of American Cancer Institutes Distinguished Scientist Award (2015)

Thomson Reuter's "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds 2015".

• The Wolf Prize in Medicine (2016)
• The Hope Funds Award of Excellence in Basic Science (2016)