Bert Vogelstein
| Bert Vogelstein | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
June 2, 1949 Baltimore, Maryland |
| Institutions | Johns Hopkins School of Medicine |
| Alma mater |
University of Pennsylvania Johns Hopkins School of Medicine |
| Known for | p53, Vogelgram, somatic evolution in cancer |
| Notable awards |
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013) Warren Triennial Prize (2014) |
| Spouse | Ilene |
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Website www |
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Bert Vogelstein (born 1949) is Director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pioneer in the field of cancer genomics, his studies on colorectal cancers revealed that they result from the sequential accumulation of mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. These studies now form the paradigm for modern cancer research and provided the basis for the notion of the somatic evolution of cancer. Together with Martin Nowak at Harvard University, he developed many mathematical models to understand the evolutionary process of cancer which lead to various hypotheses about mechanisms and timing of progression and seeding of metastases.
In the 1980s, Vogelstein developed new experimental approaches to study human tumors. His studies of various stages of colorectal cancers led him to propose a specific model for human tumorigenesis in 1988. In particular, he suggested that "cancer is caused by sequential mutations of specific oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes".
The first tumor suppressor gene validating this hypothesis was that encoding p53. The p53 protein was discovered 10 years earlier by several groups, including that of David Lane and Lionel Crawford, Arnold Levine, and Lloyd Old. But there was no evidence that p53 played a major role in human cancers, and the gene encoding p53 (TP53) was thought to be an oncogene rather than a tumor suppressor gene. In 1989, Vogelstein and his students discovered that TP53 not only played a role in human tumorigenesis, but that it was a common denominator of human tumors, mutated in the majority of them. He then discovered the mechanism through which TP53 suppresses tumorigenesis. Prior to these studies, the only biochemical function attributed to p53 was its binding to heat shock proteins. Vogelstein and his colleagues demonstrated that p53 had a much more specific activity: it bound DNA in a sequence-specific manner. They precisely defined its consensus recognition sequence and showed that virtually all p53 mutations found in tumors resulted in loss of the sequence-specific transcriptional activation properties of p53. They subsequently discovered genes that are directly activated by p53 to control cell birth and cell death. His group's more recent studies examining the entire compendium of human genes have shown that the TP53 gene is more frequently mutated in cancers than any other gene.
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