In 1985, as a professor of physiology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Lewis Cantley and his colleagues discovered the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway that determined much of his later career. Now, as a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, Cantley continues to investigate PI3K, the biochemical pathways that regulate normal mammalian cell growth, and the defects that cause cell transformation. In "From Kinase to Cancer," he discusses how the past two decades have illuminated the field of cancer research. "Approximately 20 years after we discovered PI3K as an enzymatic activity associated with oncoproteins, drugs that inhibit this enzyme have gone into clinical trials for cancer," says Cantley. "It is interesting to reflect on the long and sometimes tortuous pathway that led to the elucidation of the role of this enzyme in normal cell growth and in cancers."
Jack Woodall has been a columnist with The Scientist for ...
