Susan Band Horwitz is an American biochemist and professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine[1][2] where she holds the Falkenstein chair in Cancer Research as well as co-chair of the department of Molecular Pharmacology.
Horwitz is a pioneer in dissecting the mechanisms of action of chemotherapeutic drugs including camptothecin, epipodophyllotoxins, and bleomycin, and taxol.
[3] However, since taxol is in short supply, Horwitz is directing studies in her lab to identify similar therapies in natural products.
[3] Following the completion of her PhD program, her next venture was in the Pharmacology department as a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University Medical School under Roy Kisliuk.
In 1965, Susan and her family moved down to Georgia where she accepted a position in the pharmacology department at Emory University Medical School.
In 1967, she migrated back north again, this time to New York where she took a job as a research assistant under Arthur Grollman at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
[4] Horwitz had been working on several anti tumor drugs in her lab that inhibited the cell cycle by binding to DNA.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) contacted her one day in 1977, and inquired whether she would be interested in working on a drug for them, called Taxol.
Electron crystallography studies from other scientists including Eva Nogales and Ken Downing at the Lawrence Berkeley lab in California, confirmed their initial findings, and following a period of extensive investigation, the binding site for Taxol on ß-tubulin was officially delineated.
This is not an ideal substance for bodily injection and because of this, new therapies involving the combination of Taxol with various parts of other molecules are becoming a bigger frontier for research.
[1] With the search for similar microtubulin binding molecules, scientists explored many natural products in the ocean, specifically sponges.