Lewis C. Cantley (born February 20, 1949) is an American cell biologist and biochemist who has made significant advances to the understanding of cancer metabolism.
Cantley grew up in West Virginia, remaining there at Wesleyan College where he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry in 1971.
In 1975 he moved to Harvard University for a postdoctoral fellowship under Guido Guidotti, where he discovered that an impurity in commercial preparations of ATP, vanadate, acts as a transition state analog for phosphate hydrolysis.
In 1985 Cantley and colleagues Malcolm Whitman, David Kaplan, Tom Roberts, and Brian Schaffhausen made the seminal discovery of the existence of phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K).
[5] Cantley is married to Vicki Sato, herself a prominent figure in the pharmaceutical industry and a professor at Harvard University in both the Business and Medical Schools.
The prize, which carries a $3 million cash award, recognizes excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and human life.
The kinase specificity matrices generated from these experiments served as the basis for creating the website Scansite, allowing the de novo identification of candidate phosphorylation sites in an arbitrary protein.
[32] Modification of the original oriented peptide approach has allowed for large scale, kinome-wide determination of protein kinase specificity.
[8][9][34][35] The role of PI-3-kinase in anabolic signaling by insulin, IGF-1, and other growth factors makes a straightforward link between metabolism and cancer, especially in light of the discovery that the PIK3CA gene encoding PI-3-kinase is an oncogene.
[36] In recent years Cantley and colleagues have made additional links between metabolic regulation and oncogenic transformation with their discovery that the M2 isoform of pyruvate kinase is associated with cancer.