Council Delegate for the Medical Sciences division of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) Channing Joseph Der is an American scientist and educator, and Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
[5] This discovery prompted intense pharmaceutical industry pursuit of inhibitors of the farnesyltransferase enzyme that catalyzes this lipid modification on RAS and other proteins.
[6] This has led to a current Phase 2 clinical trial using farnesyltransferase inhibitors to inhibit HRAS-driven head and neck squamous cell carcinomas.
In collaborative studies with Francis Collins, MD (former Director, National Institutes of Health), he also demonstrated that these inhibitors corrected the protein defect that causes progeria, a disease of “rapid aging”.
Autophagy, derived from the Greek meaning “eating of self”, is a process whereby cancer cells acquire the energy needed to maintain their high growth capacity.