Signaling Star
As one of the 25 most highly cited scientists for a decade, Tony Pawson has proposed ideas in cell signaling that are now shaping treatment strategies for some of the world’s most important diseases.
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In the early 1980s, Tony Pawson made a discovery that would eventually shape scientists’ views of the proteins involved in cell signaling and lead to promising new strategies for treating cancer and other diseases. It just took a little while.
At the time, he was an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, trying to figure out how healthy cells turned cancerous through disruptions in their signaling mechanisms. In one example of this type of disruption, a landmark paper published in 1970 in Nature, scientists showed that the overexpression of a single gene called Src in the Rous sarcoma virus caused cancer in tissue infected...
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