Distinguished cell biologist Lewis C. Cantley of Dana Farber Cancer Institute will deliver the John T. Edsall Lecture on Thursday, December 7, 2023 at noon in the Northwest building, B103. His talk will be titled “Dysregulation of Lipid Kinases and Protein Kinases in Diabetes and Cancer.”
The lecture’s namesake is Harvard professor and biochemist John Tileston Edsall (1902-2002). For more information on his legacy, see below.
Cantley is Professor of Cancer Biology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and his laboratory investigates the biochemical basis for metabolic control by growth factors. He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University and completed a postdoc under the guidance of MCB professor Guido Guidotti (1933-2021). Cantley is best known for identifying and studying the PI3K enzyme, which plays a critical role in both cancer and metabolic pathways. Ensuing work showed that PI3K is strongly induced by oncogenes; showed that PI3K is the long-sought mediator of the insulin responses that control glucose metabolism; demonstrated a direct biochemical link of PI3K to oncogenic protein kinases; and identified upstream and downstream activators. These findings set the stage for chemical targeting of PI3K-related pathways, thus yielding several cancer treatments.
In synergistic work, Cantley has developed and applied approaches that allow to determine optimal motifs for growth factor-regulated protein interactions and substrates of protein kinases. Most recently, these techniques have allowed Cantley and his colleagues to accurately predict the most likely protein kinase or kinases to phosphorylate any site identified in mass spec proteomics, thus enabling detailed investigations of hundreds of thousands of molecular interactions. This work has garnered Cantley numerous awards and will be the subject of his Edsall Lecture.
He has served as the Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and was a founding faculty member of Harvard’s graduate program in Systems Biology.
Please join us on Thursday, December 7 to learn more about Professor Cantley’s research.
About the John T. Edsall Lecture
The Edsall Lecture is given annually in honor of John Edsall, a member of the faculty of Harvard University from 1928 to 1973, when he became emeritus but remained engaged in research for more than 20 years. He died in 2002 a few months short of 100 years of age. Dr. Edsall’s scientific career started in Edwin J. Cohn’s Department of Physical Chemistry at Harvard Medical School, where he studied the properties of the muscle proteins and of the amino acids. These studies among many others led to the 1943 book by Cohn and Edsall, Proteins, Amino Acids and Peptides as Ions and Dipolar Ions, which became a classic in the field of protein chemistry. During World War II he had a key role in isolating blood proteins for the war effort and developed fibrin foam, a porous form of a fibrin clot for use in neurosurgical procedures. In 1954, Dr. Edsall joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and moved to the Biological Laboratories, where he started research on carbonic anhydrase. He was greatly concerned with education. He was a tutor in the biochemical sciences concentration for 40 years and Head Tutor from more than 25 years. He taught a course on biophysical chemistry at the college from 1940 until he retired; the course led to the writing of a textbook with his closest scientific colleague, Jeffries Wyman. He had a leading role in 1954 in the formation of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Biochemistry, a graduate program leading to the PhD degree in biochemistry; the committee became the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1967. Dr. Edsall was also a champion in the fight for the freedom and integrity of science.
by Guido Guidotti
