Lewis C. Cantley

Lewis Clayton Cantley ( born February 20, 1949 in Charleston, West Virginia) is an American molecular biologist and biochemist.

Cantley studied at Wesleyan College Chemistry with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1971 and in 1975 received his doctorate from Cornell University in Physical Chemistry, where he worked in enzyme kinetics with Gordon Hammes. In 1978 he became assistant professor in 1983 and associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard University. In 1985 he became professor of physiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He became a professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Division Signal Transduction at Beth Israel Hospital in 1992. In 2003 he was one of the founders of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and in 2007 he became Director of Cancer Research at Beth Israel. In 2012 he became director of the newly established Cancer Research Center of Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian Hospital.

In 1985, he discovered with Malcolm Whitman, David Kaplan, Thomas M. Roberts and Brian Schaffhausen, the phosphoinositide 3 - kinases as signaling proteins. He also clarified the role of defects in the signaling pathway for the development of cancer and examined its role in diabetes and autoimmune diseases.

His laboratory built from the mid- 1990s, also has a database search service to find out, for example, the substrate specificity of protein kinases fast.

In 2013 he was one of the first winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. In 2000 he was awarded the Heinrich Wieland Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is married to Harvard Professor Vicki Sato.