A West Virginia native is one of the first winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, an award that comes with a $3 million prize.
Dr. Lewis Cantley, who is originally from Big Chimney in Kanawha County, says Art Levinson, Chairman of the Board for Apple, notified him of his winnings.
On the award amount, “I thought he was going to say $100,000 or something and he said $3 million and I was glad I was sitting down,” Dr. Cantley said on Friday’s MetroNews Talkline.
Dr. Cantley is one of the eleven people recognized in the inaugural year for the award program.
He won the prize for the discovery of the PI3-Kinase gene and its role in cancer metabolism.
“When we started characterizing what it did, we realized that it was a central player in telling cells to grow,” he said.
Dr. Cantley compares the gene to the accelerator in a car. In cases of cancer, that accelerator gets stuck in the “on” position, so the diseased cells keep growing. However, he says, there is a protein in the gene that can be inhibited by small molecules in pills.
Today, 16 PI3-K inhibitors are in clinical trials.
He says the discovery could one day change cancer treatment. “Still, we have to rely on chemotherapy and radiation treatment and surgery as our first line of treatment,” Dr. Cantley said.
“But I think these smart pills that really get at what exactly is going wrong with the cancer, that’s like going in and repairing your accelerator, rather than just throwing a bomb at your car and so the collateral damage, hopefully, will be less.”
Dr. Cantley is a graduate of Herbert Hoover High School in Kanawha County and West Virginia Wesleyan College in Upshur County. He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University and has taught at Tufts University and Harvard University.
He is now the Cancer Center Director at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian.
His mother still lives in Big Chimney and he has a sister in Charleston.
Billionaires Levinson with Apple, Sergey Brin, Ann Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Priscilla Chan and Yuri Milner created The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences to recognize excellence in research aimed at curing intractable disease and extending human life.
In the coming years, five prizes will be awarded annually.
You can see the full list of this year’s winners at www.breakthroughprizeinlifesciences.org/