Advisors
Papers highlighted in the Milestones were chosen with the help of a panel of experts listed below.
Advisors list
- Jerry Adams
- Andrew Feinberg
- Laurence Kolonel
- Allan Balmain
- Napoleone Ferrara
- Joan Massagué
- Mariano Barbacid
- Eli Gilboa
- Frank McCormick
- Jiri Bartek
- Gary Gilliland
- Joseph R Nevins
- Stephen B Baylin
- Todd R Golub
- Paul Nurse
- Mina J Bissell
- Daniel A Haber
- Pier Paolo Pandolfi
- Thomas Blankenstein
- Gregory J Hannon
- Luis F Parada
- Michael F Clarke
- Steve Jackson
- Janet D Rowley
- Graham Colditz
- Elwood Jensen
- Judith Sebolt-Leopold
- Sara A Courtneidge
- Peter A Jones
- Gregg L Semenza
- Ronald A DePinho
- V Craig Jordan
- Charles Sherr
- John E Dick
- Michael B Kastan
- Bert Vogelstein
- Julian Downward
- Robert S Kerbel
- Robert Weinberg
- Brian Druker
Jerry Adams
Jerry Adams is the Joint Head of the Molecular Genetics of Cancer Division of the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and the Director of a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Specialized Center of Research. He focuses on the role of apoptosis in cancer. After his PhD studies with James D Watson at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, he undertook postdoctoral studies with Frederick Sanger in Cambridge, UK, where he met his career-long associate Suzanne Cory. After further postdoctoral work in Geneva, Switzerland, they established a laboratory at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in 1971. Adams and Cory are best known for their contributions to unravelling the role of chromosome translocation in tumorigenesis through establishing transgenic models, and for discoveries of the effects of impaired apoptosis in the development of cancer and their therapeutic implications.
Allan Balmain
Allan Balmain and his laboratory are interested in the development of mouse models of human cancer. They have characterized many of the specific genetic events and biological stages that are involved in the initiation, promotion and progression of chemically induced skin tumours, and have generated transgenic animal models that recapitulate these changes. More recent work has focused on the genetic basis of tumour susceptibility, based on the identification of strains and species of mice that are 'genetically resistant' to cancer. They have mapped a number of these genes, and are applying the results of this analysis to the discovery of human low-penetrance cancer-susceptibility genes.
Mariano Barbacid
Mariano Barbacid is the Director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), Madrid, Spain. He was born in Madrid in 1949, and received his PhD in biochemistry from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 1974. From 1974 to 1978, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. In 1978, he started his own group to work on the molecular biology of human tumours. This led to the isolation of the first human oncogene, and its subsequent identification as a mutant allele of H-RAS in 1982. Other contributions of special relevance include the finding, in 1991, that the members of the Trk family of tyrosine protein kinases − previously discovered by his group − were the signalling receptors for the nerve growth factor (NGF) family of neurotrophic factors. In 1984, he moved to the National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Maryland, USA, as the Head of the Developmental Oncology Section. In 1988, he joined the Bristol Myers-Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, where he became the Vice President of Oncology Drug Discovery in 1995. In 1998, he returned to his native Madrid to create the CNIO, which currently houses 300 investigators allocated to 20 research groups (see Editorial in Nature Genet. 37, 558; 2005). Since his return to Spain, he has concentrated on the study of the role of cell-cycle regulators in vivo, and the design of new animal models for cancer using gene-targeting technologies. The relevance of his work has been recognised by several awards, including the Young Investigator Award of the American Association of Cancer Research (USA, 1986), the Steiner Prize (Switzerland, 1988), the Ipsen Prize (France, 1994) and the Brupbacher Cancer Research Prize (Switzerland, 2005). In addition, he has a doctorate (honoris causa) from the Universidad Internacional Menendez y Pelayo in Spain (1995), and has been a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) since 1996. He has published 160 original papers and 22 invited reviews in refereed journals, almost one-third of which appear in journals with an impact factor of 14 or higher.
Jiri Bartek
Jiri Bartek is the Head of the Department of Cell Cycle and Cancer at the Institute of Tumour Biology of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen, Denmark. He received his M.D. from Palacky University in Olomouc, and his PhD in cell biology from the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Prague, Czech Republic. Prior to his present appointment, he was a research group leader and a department head in research institutes in Brno and Prague in the Czech Republic, and spent several years as a visiting scientist at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, UK, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. His main research interests include the molecular mechanisms of mammalian cell-cycle control and responses to DNA damage, and the cancer-predisposing aberrations of these regulatory pathways.
Stephen B Baylin
Born in 1942 in Durham, North Carolina, USA, Stephen B. Baylin attended Duke University, North Carolina, and earned his MD at its medical school, where he completed his internship and first year residency in internal medicine. Then, he worked for 2 years at the National Heart and Lung Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 1971, he joined the Departments of Oncology and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Maryland, USA, which is an affiliation that still continues. Presently, he is a professor of medicine and oncology there. He is also the Chief of the Cancer Biology Division of the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, and the Associate Director for Research of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. He has been a member of committees of the American Cancer Society and the NIH, and his honours include a Research Career Development Award from the NIH, the Edwin Astwood Lectureship of the Endocrine Society, and appointment to the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professorship in Cancer Research. So far, during his highly productive career he has authored or co-authored over 300 full-length publications.
Mina J Bissell
Mina Bissell has changed some established paradigms in the past 30 years. She majored in chemistry and received a PhD in bacterial genetics from Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, in 1969. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), California, USA, where she was appointed the Director of Life Sciences in 1992. Upon stepping down from this position, she was one of only seven named Distinguished Scientists. She has authored more than 250 publications and sits on the editorial boards of many scientific journals, most recently Science magazine. She also sits on a number of national and international scientific and government boards. She has given numerous 'named' lectures, and has received many awards and citations, including the Lawrence Award and Medal, the Mellon Award, the Eli Lilly/Clowes Award, the first 'Innovator Award' of the United States Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program, the Susan G Komen Foundation Brinker Award and one of the first Discovery Health Channel Medical Honors. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as the President of the American Society for Cell Biology and the International Society of Differentiation. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris, France, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Most recently, she became the first Office of Biological and Environmental Research/Department of Energy Distinguished Scientist Fellow in Life Sciences.
Thomas Blankenstein
Thomas Blankenstein received his PhD from the Institute of Genetics in the Department of Immunology in Cologne, Germany. Under the supervision of Ulrich Krawinkel and Klaus Rajewsky, he analysed the molecular evolution of immunoglobulin genes. In 1988, he joined the Institute of Immunology of the Free University of Berlin, Germany, to work on the role of cytokines on tumour rejection together with Tibor Diamantstein. In 1991, he was a visiting scientist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA, in the Department of Pathology of Hans Schreiber. In 1994, he became a group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. In 2000, he was additionally appointed as the Head of the Institute of Immunology of the Charité University of Medicine, Berlin. His laboratory is interested in cancer immunology, immune and gene therapy, experimental cancer models and tumour stroma.
Michael F Clarke
Michael F Clarke is a professor of medicine, the Karel H and Avice N Beekhuis Professor in Cancer Biology, and the Associate Director of the Stanford University Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, California, USA. He received his MD from Indiana University and his post-doctoral training at the US National Institutes of Health. His laboratory isolated solid tumour cancer stem cells. His group investigates differences between normal stem cells and their malignant counterparts. Such differences might lead to the identification of novel therapeutic targets. The laboratory is particularly interested in how self-renewal, which is the process by which stem cells regenerate themselves, is dysregulated in cancer stem cells.
Graham Colditz
Graham Colditz trained in internal medicine and epidemiology, and has focused his research on the health consequences of lifestyle among women, with particular emphasis on postmenopausal hormones and breast cancer risk. He has led the Nurses' Health Study since 1999, and has fronted many efforts to translate epidemiological findings into public-health action that will reduce the cancer burden.
Sara A Courtneidge
Sara A Courtneidge was born in the UK, and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Leeds and her PhD from the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Following postdoctoral study at the University of California, San Francisco, USA, and an independent position at the National Institute for Medical Research, she joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in 1985, where she rose to the position of senior scientist. Changing course in 1994, she joined Sugen Inc as the Vice President of Research, where she guided novel kinase discovery and validation efforts in oncology. From 2001 to 2005 she was a distinguished scientific investigator at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. She joined the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, California, USA, in May 2005, as Professor and Director of the Cell Adhesion and Extracellular Matrix Program. Her contributions to cancer research have been recognized with numerous honours, including election to the European Molecular Biology Organization (1990), the Jubilee Lecture and Harden Medal of the British Biochemical Society (2001), and the Feodor Lynen Lecture and Lynen Medal (2005).
Ronald A DePinho
Ron DePinho is the American Cancer Society Research Professor, the Director of the Center for Applied Cancer Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor of medicine and genetics at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, USA. His research has focused on key genetic events in the life history of cancer cells, including those that impact on cell-cycle control (the INK4A-RB pathway), cellular survival (the ARF-p53 pathway), cellular crisis (telomeres and telomerase), host-tumour interactions and tumour maintenance. His programme makes extensive use of genomics and engineered mouse models of human cancer to discover novel cancer genes and define their functional roles, with the goal of developing new cancer drugs.
John E Dick
John E Dick is currently a professor of molecular and medical genetics at the University of Toronto, Canada, a senior scientist of the University Health Network, and was appointed as a Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Biology in 2002. He received his PhD from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and then undertook postdoctoral training with Alan Bernstein at the Ontario Cancer Institute and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, Canada. His work led to the genetic transduction of murine stem cells and the use of retroviral-mediated clonal marking to characterize stem-cell biology. His research has focused on understanding the mechanisms that regulate the developmental programme of normal and leukaemic human stem cells. His team developed a xenograft-repopulation assay that they used to identify normal and leukaemic human stem cells. His work has been recognized by several major prizes and awards, including the Michael Smith Award of Excellence from the Medical Research Council of Canada, the Robert Nobel Prize from the National Cancer Institute of Canada, the Herman Boerhaave Medal of Honour from Leiden University, The Netherlands, and the 2005 Dameschek Prize from the American Society of Hematology. In 2004, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Julian Downward
Julian Downward began his research career working with Michael Waterfield on the purification and sequencing of the epidermal growth factor receptor, thereby establishing its similarity to the product of the retroviral oncogene v-erbB. Postdoctoral work with Robert Weinberg led to an interest in the RAS oncogene, which has been the focus of his group ever since. His laboratory has established mechanisms of Ras regulation by extracellular stimuli through Son of sevenless (Sos) and GTPase-activating protein (GAP), and also identified the Raf and phosphatidylinositol 3 (PI3)-kinase pathways as effectors of Ras signalling. In addition, he has mapped cell-survival signalling downstream of Ras and established its importance in cellular transformation. More recently, he has concentrated on functional genomic approaches to investigate the mechanisms of tumour formation and maintenance, particularly using genome-scale RNA-interference libraries. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Associate Director of the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute.
Brian Druker
Brian Druker focuses his research on the regulation of the growth of cancer cells, and the practical application of this knowledge to cancer therapies. His laboratory performed critical pre-clinical studies of imatinib (Gleevec), which targets the molecular defect in chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). He then led the highly successful clinical trials of imatinib, which is now United States Food and Drug Administration approved for CML and gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST). He graduated from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in 1981, completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Barnes Hospital, Washington School of Medicine, Missouri, and then trained in oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts, USA. He is now an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Cancer Institute.
Andrew Feinberg
Andrew Feinberg studied humanities at Yale University, Connecticut, USA, and received his MD (1976) and medical genetics training from Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA. He carried out his postdoctoral work and was a junior faculty member with Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Michigan from 1986 to 1994. Since 1994, he has been the King Fahd Professor of Medicine, Molecular Biology & Genetics, and Oncology at Johns Hopkins. Along with colleagues, he identified altered methylation in human cancer, human imprinted genes and loss of imprinting in cancer, and the molecular basis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. He has developed several molecular methods, including random priming. Recently, his group has been studying the epigenetics of human complex traits in general at Johns Hopkins, where he directs the Genome Center in Epigenetics.
Napoleone Ferrara
Napoleone Ferrara obtained an MD from the University of Catania Medical School, Italy, in 1981. He joined Genentech in 1988 after postdoctoral training at the University of California at San Francisco, USA. At present, he is the Genentech Fellow at Genentech, Inc. His research interests concern the regulation of angiogenesis. In 1989, he and his colleagues isolated and cloned vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Subsequently, his laboratory has extensively investigated the basic biology and the potential clinical applications of VEGF. In 1993, he and his colleagues demonstrated that inhibition of VEGF using a monoclonal antibody suppresses tumour growth in vivo. This work led to the clinical development of bevacizumab (Avastin), which is a humanized anti-VEGF monoclonal antibody that was the first anti-angiogenic agent to be approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration as an anticancer agent. Furthermore, his work with several collaborators on intraocular neovascularization led to the clinical development of ranibizumab (Lucentis) for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration . Recently, his laboratory has been involved in the identification of novel tissue-specific angiogenic factors.
Eli Gilboa
Eli Gilboa is the Joseph and Dorothy Beard Professor of Experimental Surgery and Immunology at Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina, USA. He is also the Director of the Center for Genetic and Cellular Therapies at Duke University Medical Center, and oversees the development and clinical implementation of novel gene-based and cell-based therapies. He received his PhD in molecular biology at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, was an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, from 1980 to 1986, and served as an associate member of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research Molecular Biology Program from 1986 to 1993. His research interests are cellular immunology and immunotherapy using mRNA-transfected dendritic cells as therapeutic vaccines in the setting of cancer and infectious diseases. He is also a scientific founder of Argos Therapeutics (formerly Merix Bioscience Inc.) and co-inventor of the core therapeutic vaccine technology of the company.
Gary Gilliland
Gary Gilliland received his PhD in microbiology from the University of California, Los Angeles and his MD from the University of California, San Francisco in the USA. He completed a medical internship in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), where he was chief medical resident, and did haematology and oncology training at BWH and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He has been on the faculty at Harvard Medical School (HMS) since that time, and is currently professor of medicine and a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at HMS, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Director of the Leukemia Program for the DFCI/Harvard Cancer Center, and the Director of the Cancer Stem Cell Program of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. His research interest is in the biology and treatment of human cancers, with a focus on haematopoietic malignancies and myeloproliferative disorders.
Todd R Golub
Todd Golub is a founding member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and serves as the Director of its Cancer Program. He is a world leader in applying genomic tools to the classification and study of cancers. His work focuses on using the human genome to understand the biological and clinical challenges facing cancer medicine. He has made fundamental discoveries in the molecular basis of childhood leukaemia, and pioneered the use of genomic approaches, particularly DNA microarrays, to cancer biology. He is the Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts, USA, an associate professor of paediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is the recipient of multiple awards, including Discover Magazine's Inventor of the Year (Health Category) in 2000, the Daland Prize of the American Philosophical Society in 2001 and the Outstanding Achievement Award (formerly Cornelius Rhoads Memorial Prize) from the American Association for Cancer Research in 2002. He received his B.A. in 1985 from Carleton College, Minnesota, USA, and his M.D. in 1989 from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, Illinois, USA.
Daniel A Haber
Daniel A. Haber is the Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and the Laurel W. Schwartz Professor of Oncology at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and the American Association of Physicians (AAP), and is a recipient of the American Association for Cancer Research-National Foundation for Cancer Research (AACR-NFCR) Chair in Cancer Research (2000-2002) and the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award (2002-2007). He serves on the editorial board of the journal Cell, and is the Genetics Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. His laboratory work is focused on human cancer genetics, with a primary emphasis on the genetics of Wilms tumour and breast cancer, and the identification of molecular markers of response to targeted therapies in lung cancer. Born in Paris, France, he received his BS and MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his MD and PhD from Stanford University School of Medicine, California, USA. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a medical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and postdoctoral research at MIT, before joining the faculty at MGH in 1991. He was appointed the Director of the MGH Cancer Center in 2003.
Gregory J Hannon
Gregory J Hannon is a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, USA. He received a BA in biochemistry and a PhD in molecular biology from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA, where he trained in the laboratory of Tim Nilsen. From 1992 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund in the laboratory of David Beach, where he explored cell-cycle regulation in mammalian cells. After becoming an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1996 and a Pew Scholar in 1997, he began to make seminal observations in the emerging field of RNA interference in 2000. He assumed his current position as a professor in the Cold Spring Harbor Watson School of Biological Sciences in 2002, and became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2005. He continues to explore the mechanisms and biological functions of RNA interference, as well as its applications to cancer research.
Steve Jackson
Steve Jackson is the Head of Cancer Research UK Laboratories at the Gurdon Institute, and is a professor of biology at the University of Cambridge, UK. After receiving his PhD training in the laboratory of Jean Beggs at Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh in the UK, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Robert Tjian at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. In 1991, he was recruited to what is now the Gurdon Institute. His laboratory has made major contributions to our knowledge of gene transcription and has played a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of how cells respond to DNA damage. His group is currently focused on elucidating the molecular mechanisms of DNA repair and DNA-damage signalling in yeast and mammalian cells. In 1997, he founded the company KuDOS Pharmaceuticals Ltd. to transfer knowledge of DNA repair to medical applications. The company has several clinical trials underway and has a range of other products - mainly DNA damage-response inhibitors − in pre-clinical development. His academic group is independent of KuDOS, but benefits from strong scientific links with the company.
Elwood Jensen
Elwood V. Jensen is the Distinguished University Professor and the Wile Chair for Cancer Research at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine, Ohio, USA. For his discovery of the oestrogen receptor (ER) and related research, he has received 27 awards, including, most recently, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. After obtaining his PhD in organic chemistry, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, to learn steroid chemistry with Leopold Ruzicka. He subsequently returned to join the faculty at the University of Chicago Medical School, which shortly afterwards became the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research, Illinois, USA, where he investigated the physiological mechanisms of oestrogen action. He spent most of his career at the Ben May Laboratory, serving as the Director from 1969 to 1982, before retiring in 1990 as the Charles B. Huggins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. After more than 10 years as a visiting professor at various institutes in the USA and Europe, he joined the UC College of Medicine in 2002, where he continues his ER-related research.
Peter A Jones
Peter A. Jones is the Director of the University of Southern California/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Distinguished Professor of Urology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, USA. He is known for his studies on the molecular biology of cancer, and on the basic mechanisms of DNA methylation and its role in cancer and differentiation. He was born in South Africa, raised and attended school in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and received his PhD from the University of London in 1973. He joined the University of Southern California in 1977, attaining the rank of professor in 1985, and becoming the Director of the Cancer Center in 1993. He is currently the President of the American Association for Cancer Research. He has received a variety of honours, including the Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Cancer Institute.
V Craig Jordan
V. Craig Jordan is the Vice President and Research Director for Medical Sciences at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, Pennsylvania, USA. He is the Alfred G. Knudson Chair of Cancer Research and an adjunct professor of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained a BSc (1969), PhD (1972) and DSc (1984) in pharmacology from the University of Leeds, UK. In 2001, he was awarded an honorary MD from the University of Leeds for his services to healthcare with the development of tamoxifen and raloxifene. He was a professor of human oncology and pharmacology at the Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1980 to 1993. He was a professor of biological chemistry, cancer pharmacology and medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, USA, from 1993 to 2004, and was the Diana Princess of Wales Professor of Cancer Research (1999-2004). He developed the laboratory principles, and subsequent clinical translation, of tamoxifen and raloxifene for use as treatments and preventives for breast cancer and osteoporosis. His laboratory first described selective oestrogen-receptor modulation, which resulted in new drugs called selective oestrogen-receptor modulators (SERMs). He has received worldwide recognition for his work on tamoxifen and raloxifene, and, most notably, the Kettering Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation (2003), the Bristol Myers Squibb Award (2001) and the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor (2002). In 2002, her Majesty, the Queen, appointed him as Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to international breast cancer research.
Michael B Kastan
Michael B Kastan received his MD and PhD from Washington University, Missouri, and completed his paediatric residency and paediatric haematology-oncology fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland, USA. He was a professor of oncology, paediatrics and molecular biology at Johns Hopkins when he moved to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Tennessee, USA, in 1998, where he is currently the Chairman of the Department of Hematology-Oncology and the Director of the St. Jude Cancer Center. He made the seminal discovery that the p53 tumour-suppressor protein participates in cellular responses to DNA damage. The manuscripts reporting this discovery are among the most highly cited publications of the 1990s. Over the past few years, his work has continued to elucidate the steps involved in cell cycle-checkpoint pathways, with a recent focus on the ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM) gene product and its roles in modulating cellular responses to ionizing radiation, including the high impact discovery of how the ATM protein is activated by DNA damage. Based on studies of these pathways, novel approaches to modulate cellular responses to irradiation, to improve tumour responses to therapy and to prevent development of cancers are being explored.
Robert S Kerbel
Robert S Kerbel holds a Canada Research Chair in Molecular Medicine, and his laboratory is based at the Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada. He is also a professor in the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Laboratory Medicine/Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. Over the past 30 years, he has studied aspects of tumour biology including progression, metastasis, drug resistance and angiogenesis. Currently, his main interest is the design and clinical translation of novel anti-angiogenic drug-combination treatments, especially those that involve metronomic chemotherapy.
Laurence Kolonel
Laurence Kolonel is the Deputy Director of the Cancer Research Center and a professor of public health at the University of Hawaii. He received his MD from Harvard University, Massachusetts, and a PhD in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His research focuses on the aetiology of cancer in multiethnic populations, especially the role of nutritional factors. His work also explores the basis for the alterations in cancer risk in migrants, especially the Japanese-American population of Hawaii. He recently received a MERIT award from the US National Cancer Institute for his research.
Joan Massagué
Joan Massagué is the Chairman of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a professor at the Weill-Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, New York, USA. He is also the Adjunct Director of the Barcelona Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Spain. He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1978 from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, until 1982, when he joined the Faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He assumed his current positions in 1989. His research has focused on delineating the transforming growth factor-β pathway, and the molecular mechanisms underlying normal cytostasis and cancer metastasis.
Frank McCormick
Frank McCormick is the Director of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Comprehensive Cancer Center and Cancer Research Institute, which is a multidisciplinary research and clinical care organization that is one of the largest matrix cancer centres in the Western USA. A native of Cambridge, UK, he received his BSc in biochemistry from the University of Birmingham in 1972, and his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1975. He has held postdoctoral fellowships in the USA at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and in the UK at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now part of Cancer Research UK) in London. He has been a fellow of the Royal Society since 1996. Prior to joining the UCSF faculty, he pursued cancer-related work with several Bay Area biotechnology firms, including positions with Cetus Corporation (Director of Molecular Biology, 1981-1990, and Vice President of Research, 1990-1991) and Chiron Corporation, where he was the Vice President of Research from 1991 to 1992. In 1992, he founded Onyx Pharmaceuticals and served as its Chief Scientific Officer until 1996. His current research interests centre on the fundamental differences between normal and cancer cells that can allow the development of novel therapeutic strategies. In addition to his position as the Director of the UCSF Cancer Center, he holds the David A. Wood Distinguished Professorship of Tumor Biology and Cancer Research in the UCSF Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He is the author of more than 243 scientific publications.
Joseph R Nevins
Joseph R Nevins is the Barbara Levine Professor of Breast Cancer Genomics at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied Genomics and Technology in the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms controlling gene expression in animal cells and, in particular, the identification of regulatory pathways that govern the growth of normal cells and are targets for oncogenic events. He discovered the E2F transcription factor and identified its association with the retinoblastoma (RB) tumour suppressor. Since that time, his work has focused on the role of the Rb/E2F pathway in the control of cell proliferation. More recent work has made use of genomic analysis of gene expression to identify expression signatures that reflect cancer outcomes, response to therapy and the deregulation of various oncogenic signalling pathways.
Paul Nurse
Paul Nurse became the ninth President of The Rockefeller University, New York, USA, in September 2003. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded in recognition of work that advanced understanding of the biological process by which cells make copies of themselves. His basic research focuses on the molecular machinery that drives cell division. Through this process - the cell cycle - cells copy themselves and multiply to form complex organisms. This is crucial to survival, because the human body must consistently replenish many of its trillions of cells. Each new cell is a product of the cell cycle. His research accomplishments include the identification of corresponding genes for a key regulator of the cell cycle in both yeast and human cells. His discovery of the regulator molecule, cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK), in cells of both organisms revealed that it is essential to life in both simple and complex organisms, and that it has been conserved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Born in 1949 in Norwich, UK, he graduated from Birmingham University, and received a PhD in cell biology/biochemistry at the University of East Anglia. After completing postdoctoral studies in Bern, Switzerland, and in Edinburgh and Sussex in the UK, for 4 years he led the Cell Cycle Control Laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London. In 1988, he joined the University of Oxford as the Chair of the Department of Microbiology, returning in 1993 to the ICRF as its Director of Research, and in 2002 taking up the position of Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, which is the charity formed from the merger of the ICRF and the Cancer Research Campaign. He has received the Royal Society's Copley, Wellcome and Royal Medals, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Alfred P Sloan Jr Prize & Medal (US), the Pezcoller Award (Italy), the Rosenstiel Award and Medal, the Heineken Prize (The Netherlands), the Jimenez Diaz Medal (Spain), the Jeantet Prize (Switzerland) and the Gairdner Foundation International Award (Canada). A fellow of the Royal Society, he is a member of the Council for Science and Technology, which advises the British Prime Minister and the Cabinet. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Academia Europaea, which is a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he became a founding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was knighted in 1999 for services to cancer research and cell biology, and was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 2002.
Pier Paolo Pandolfi
Pier Paolo Pandolfi is a professor and member of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, and the Head of the Molecular and Developmental Biology Laboratory at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA. His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer pathogenesis − with an emphasis on oncogenes and the function of tumour-suppressor genes - as well as deconstructing the molecular genetics of cancer in the mouse. The research carried out in his laboratory has been seminal in defining the molecular mechanisms and genetics underlying the pathogenesis of acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL), lymphomas and solid tumours, and in modelling these cancers in the mouse. In particular, he and his colleagues characterized the function of the fusion oncoproteins of APL and the genes involved in the chromosomal translocations of APL, as well as major tumour suppressors such as phosphatase with tensin homology (PTEN), the promyelocytic leukaemia (PML) protein and p53. The elucidation of the molecular basis underlying APL pathogenesis has led to the development of novel therapeutic strategies that are currently been tested in clinical trials.
Luis F Parada
Luis F Parada received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He is now professor of cell biology and the Director of the Center for Developmental Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA. He has a long-standing interest in the role of RAS and receptor tyrosine kinase signalling in cancer and embryonic development. His early work with Robert Weinberg identified the RAS oncogene in cancer cell lines, and the contributions of MYC to the transformation of primary cells. Subsequently, he led the group that identified the TRKA receptor as the physiological receptor for nerve growth factor. He currently focuses his interest on mouse models of human cancer.
Janet D Rowley
Janet Rowley earned a PhB (1944), BS (1946) and MD (1948) at the University of Chicago in the USA. In 1962, after a year at Oxford University in the UK studying normal human chromosomes, she returned to the University of Chicago as a research associate in the Section of Hematology/Oncology, and became a professor of medicine in 1977, a position that she holds today. In the 1970s, she used quinacrine fluorescence and Giemsa staining to demonstrate that the abnormal Philadelphia chromosome (chromosome 22) implicated in human chronic myeloid leukaemia was involved in a translocation with chromosome 9 in all cases. She also identified translocations between chromosomes 8 and 21, and chromosomes 15 and 17, in acute leukaemias. She argued, in the 1970s, that specific translocations caused specific leukaemias, going against the established view of the cause of cancer. Although there was initial resistance, her work has proven immensely influential, and by the year 2005 over 400 recurring translocations had been identified in different cancers. Cloning translocation breakpoints has led to effective therapy targeting the genes involved. In 1998, she shared the prestigious Lasker Award for work on genetic changes in cancer and also received the National Medal of Science, and she was awarded the Landon Prize for Translational Cancer Research in 2005.
Judith Sebolt-Leopold
Judith Sebolt-Leopold is the Executive Director of Mechanistic & Target Biology at Pfizer Global R&D, Ann Arbor Laboratories, Michigan, USA. She received her BA from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and her PhD in biological sciences from Purdue University, Indiana, USA. After completing postdoctoral studies in experimental oncology at Indiana University School of Medicine, she began her pharmaceutical career when she joined the Cancer Research Department at Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert in 1984. In recent years, her research has focused on targeting the RAS-mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase pathway for the development of novel anticancer therapies. She has led multiple cross-disciplinary research teams, resulting in the advancement of clinical candidates, including the mitogen-activated or extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (MEK) inhibitors CI-1040 and PD0325901.
Gregg L Semenza
Greg Semenza is a professor of paediatrics, medicine, oncology, radiation oncology and the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Maryland, USA, and the Director of the Vascular Biology Program of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering. He is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Physiology, Antioxidants and Redox Signaling, Cancer Research, Cardiovascular Research, Circulation Research and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. He has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Society for Pediatric Research, and received the E. Mead Johnson Award for Research in Pediatrics. His laboratory discovered hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF1), which is a transcriptional regulatory protein that controls responses to reduced oxygen availability in humans and other metazoan species. His group has demonstrated that HIF1 is required for normal development, and that it has important roles in many critical physiological processes, and in the pathogenesis of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Charles Sherr
Charles J Sherr is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Tennessee, USA. He determined that the FMS oncogene encodes the receptor for macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF/CSF-1) and identified mammalian cell-cycle regulators with activities governed by mitogenic signalling. These include the three mammalian D-type cyclins, cyclin-dependent kinase-4 (CDK4), several polypeptide CDK inhibitors and the ARF tumour suppressor. His studies elucidated how mammalian cells respond to extracellular cues in regulating their cell-division cycle, and revealed how perturbations in these signalling pathways lead to cancer. He shared the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award with David Beach in 2000, and was the recipient of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Pezcoller Prize in 2000, the AACR-Landon Prize in 2003 and the General Motors Cancer Foundation Charles F. Mott Prize in 2004. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and to the Institute of Medicine in 2005.
Bert Vogelstein
Bert Vogelstein is the Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Maryland, USA, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work on colorectal cancers forms the paradigm for much of modern cancer research, with profound implications for diagnostic and therapeutic strategies of the future. He has received numerous national and international awards for his research, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Robert Weinberg
Robert A Weinberg received his BS and PhD in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. He did postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, and at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, USA, and then returned to MIT in 1972. In 1982, he was appointed professor of biology at MIT. He is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, and an American Cancer Society Research professor at MIT. He is an authority on the genetic basis of human cancer. He and his colleagues discovered the first human cancer-causing gene, namely the RAS oncogene, and the first known tumour-suppressor gene, namely the retinoblastoma gene RB. The principal goal of his research programme is to determine how oncogenes, their normal counterparts (proto-oncogenes) and tumour-suppressor genes fit together in the complex circuitry that controls cell growth. He is particularly interested in applying this knowledge to improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of cancer cell invasion and metastasis.
