A researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has won a $1 million prize for an advance in cancer treatment, the medical school said.
Kevan Shokat, a chemical biologist, was honored Saturday by the American Association for Cancer Research for his 2013 discovery of a hidden vulnerability in a gene that’s mutated in almost 90% of pancreatic cancers, UCSF said.
Shokat, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, won the Stephenson Global Prize for finding how to disable the gene KRAS that provides instructions for making a protein that controls how cells grow and divide.
New path for cancer drugs
“Drug companies vigorously pursued the lead,” the university said. “The first KRAS inhibitor was approved for lung cancer in 2021, and more than 60 other drugs targeting the RAS gene family are now in development.”
Shokat’s discovery “launched a new era in cancer treatment,” the university said.
The protein has a smooth, slippery surface that makes it extremely hard to target with drugs, and the cancer field had all but given up on finding a way to stop it, according to UCSF. Shokat found a drug that would attach to KRAS.
“It’s a beautiful example of someone persevering on a seemingly intractable problem,” UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood said in a statement. “He used all the tools of modern chemistry and biology to eventually crack open a discovery that has — and will have — a profound impact on human health.”
Collaboration led to the breakthrough
Shokat partnered with Jim Wells, a professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the UCSF School of Pharmacy, the university said.
“Wells had pioneered screening methods to find compounds that could grasp onto malfunctioning proteins,” it said.
“Shokat and Wells focused on a cancer-causing mutant of KRAS called G12C, which has a cysteine amino acid in the place of a glycine, creating a chemically ‘sticky’ spot that drug compounds could bond to,” UCSF said.