Thomas M. Roberts, PhD, serves as Chair of the Department of Cancer Biology at Dana-Farber, and is a Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Roberts received his PhD from Harvard University, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Dr. Roberts's laboratory has played a key role in the study of signal transduction and its translation into cancer therapy. The first definitive studies on phosphoinositide 3 (PI3) kinase were done by the Roberts Lab in collaboration with the lab of Lewis Cantley. Due to the importance of PI3 kinase in human cancer, Dr. Roberts collaborated with Dr. Jean Zhao to generate conditional knockout mice for the commonly expressed catalytic isoforms of PI3K. The end goal of these studies — determining which isoforms to target in specific cancers — underlies the superior performance of isoform-specific inhibitors in the clinic. Notably, Dr. Roberts's early research on tyrosine kinases, carried out by Drs. Brian Druker and Helen Piwnica-Worms, facilitated the kinase inhibitor program at Ciba Geigy that led to the first successful tyrosine kinase cancer therapeutic, Gleevec. Similarly, his research on PI3 kinases facilitated the development of multiple classes of PI3Kinase inhibitors. Recently, work from the Roberts and Cantley labs facilitated Novartis's development of Alpelisib, the first PI3K inhibitor approved for the treatment of breast cancer.

Source: DANA FARBER CANCER INSTITUTE INC on 09/29/2022