Charles L. Sawyers | |
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Born | Charles Lazelle Sawyers[1] 1959 (age 64–65) |
Education | Johns Hopkins University, Princeton, UCSF |
Medical career | |
Profession | Physician |
Institutions | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Howard Hughes Medical Institute |
Sub-specialties | Oncologist |
Research | Leukemia/prostate cancer |
Awards | Lasker Clinical Award (2009) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2014) |
Website | The Charles Sawyers Lab |
Charles L. Sawyers (born 1959) is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator who holds the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). HOPP is a program created in 2006 that comprises researchers from many disciplines to bridge clinical and laboratory discoveries.[2]
Sawyers received a BA from Princeton University in 1981 and an MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1985,[3] followed by an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco.[4] He became a HHMI investigator in 2002 while working at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center.[5]
Sawyers works on molecularly targeted cancer drugs, with a focus on developing a new generation of treatment options for patients. He shared the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Brian J. Druker and Nicholas Lydon,[6] for the development of the ABL kinase inhibitor imatinib for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia and the second-generation ABL inhibitor dasatinib to overcome imatinib resistance. He also co-discovered the antiandrogen drugs enzalutamide, approved by the FDA in 2012, and apalutamide[7] approved in 2019, both for treatment of advanced prostate cancer.[8]
Sawyers' cancer research is discussed in the second episode of Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.
Sawyers served as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2007[9] and of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in 2012.[10] He was also appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board by President Obama in 2012,[11] and has served on the Board of Directors of Novartis since 2013.[12] He was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology in 2017,[13] serving until 2021.[14]