Established in 1997, the prestigious award is presented annually to honor a scientist who has made a major scientific discovery in either basic or translational cancer research. This year's prize recognizes Cantley for his leadership in the field of signal transduction, most notably the discovery of a key cancer cell pathway known as phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K).
Cantley will deliver the award lecture, "The Role of PI3K in Cancer," at the AACR's 96th Annual Meeting in Anaheim California later this month and will be honored at an award ceremony at the Pezcoller Foundation in Trento, Italy this spring.
"Lew Cantley's groundbreaking work has had a tremendous impact in the field of cancer research," says BIDMC Chief Academic Officer Jeffrey S. Flier, MD. "His lab's discovery of the PI3K pathway has helped to explain how normal cells turn into cancerous cells, and in so doing, has provided the scientific community with an extremely important target in terms of future cancer treatments."
A summa cum laude graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1971, Cantley obtained a doctorate in Biophysical Chemistry from Cornell University in 1975 and did postdoctoral research at Harvard University from 1975 to 1978 before joining Harvard's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as an Assistant Professor. After holding positions at Tufts University School of Medicine, Cantley joined the faculty of BIDMC in 1992.
It was in the mid-1980s that Cantley began to focus his research on the biochemical mechanisms of cellular responses to hormones and growth factors, which led to his laborator
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Contact: Bonnie Prescott
bprescot@bidmc.harvard.edu
617-667-7306
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
7-Apr-2005