Dr. Charles Sawyers is Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis Chair and Chairman, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Sawyers obtained his MD at Johns Hopkins, did his housestaff training in…
more Internal Medicine at University of California San Francisco and completed his hematology-oncology fellowship training at UCLA. His laboratory is focused on characterizing signal transduction pathway abnormalities in various cancers, including chronic myeloid leukemia, prostate cancer and glioblastoma, with an eye toward translational implications. His research is best demonstrated through his studies of BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase function in chronic myeloid leukemia, his work with Brian Druker and Novartis in the development of the kinase inhibitor imatinib/Gleevec as primary therapy for CML, and his discovery that imatinib resistance is caused by BCR-ABL kinase domain mutations. This discovery led Dr. Sawyers to evaluate 2nd line Abl kinase inhibitors, such as the dual Src/Abl inhibitor BMS-354825, which is now showing remarkable clinical activity in imatinib-resistant patients. His work exemplifies the conduct of mechanistic investigations into basic cancer cell biology and exploiting the translational implications. Dr. Sawyers is past President of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, serves on the National Cancer Institute's Board of Scientific Councilors, and is a Member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Richard & Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award (American Association of Cancer Research), the David A. Karnofsky Award (American Society of Clinical Oncology), the Dorothy P. Landon-AACR Prize for Translational Cancer Research, and in 2009, the Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
less