Brent Stockwell | |
---|---|
Born | Bay Terrace, Queens, New York, US |
Known for | discovering Ferroptosis |
Spouse | Melissa Stockwell (m. 2000) |
Awards | Beckman Young Investigators Award |
Academic background | |
Education | AB, chemistry and economics, Cornell University PhD, 1999, Harvard University |
Thesis | Forward and reverse chemical genetic studies of transforming growth factor beta signaling (1999) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Columbia University Whitehead Institute Harvard University |
Website | stockwelllab |
Brent Roark Stockwell is an American chemical biologist. He is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Chemistry at Columbia University. In 2012,Stockwell and Scott Dixon coined the term ferroptosis and described several of its key features.
Stockwell was born in Bay Terrace,New York and attended Hunter College High School. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry and economics from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard University. [1] While completing his doctorate degree,Stockwell worked in the laboratory of Stuart Schreiber where he spent eighteen months unsuccessfully investigating a molecule that could shut down the protein TGF-beta. He eventually used naturally occurring molecules to block the effects of TGF-beta,resulting in the discovery that synthetic molecules were unlikely to be successful drug candidates. [2] As a result of his research,Stockwell founded CombinatoRx to develop combinations of FDA-approved drugs to fight disease. [3]
Following his PhD,Stockwell was appointed as a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute,where he worked on synthetic lethal screens and cell death. In 2003,he developed the first library of biologically annotated compounds and approved drugs to capture the information underlying cellular mechanisms to give scientists greater and more immediate insight into cell biology mechanisms. [4] [5] He also began a campaign to identify compounds that selectively kill engineered tumor cells,identifying and naming the novel compound erastin. [6]
Upon completing his fellowship,Stockwell joined the faculty at Columbia University as an assistant professor of biological sciences and of chemistry. Early into his tenure at the institution,Stockwell found two new compounds,RSL3 and RSL5,that could kill tumor cells. [7] In order to find drug candidates that could selectively kill tumor cells,Stockwell used cells engineered with a cancer-causing mutation and identical cells lacking the mutation. [3] As a result of his research into undiscovered mechanisms controlling cell death,Stockwell received a 2007 Beckman Young Investigators Award [8] and was named a 2009 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist. [3] Following this,he was one of six winners of the BioAccelerate NYC Prize to conduct late-stage,"proof-of-concept" research on a new class of drugs to treat cancer in a more selective and non-toxic way. [9]
In 2011,Stockwell published his first book entitled The Quest for the Cure:The Science and Stories Behind the Next Generation of Medicine. [10] [11] Later,using erastin,Stockwell discovered the process of ferroptosis,coined the term ferroptosis,described its key mechanisms,and developed the first chemical probes to control ferroptosis. [12] In 2014,he received one of 10 recipients of the 2014 Lenfest Distinguished Teaching Awards. [13]
During the COVID-19 pandemic,Stockwell co-published Lead compounds for the development of SARS-CoV-2 3CL protease inhibitors through the journal Nature Communications . [14] He was also recognized by City &State as one of the inaugural Life Sciences Power 50 amongst scientists,entrepreneurs and investors. [15] Later in November,Stockwell was again listed by Clarivate as one of the Highly Cited Researchers of the Year. [16]
Stockwell is married to Melissa,an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population and Family Health at Columbia. [17]
In the fields of medicine,biotechnology and pharmacology,drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered.
An angiogenesis inhibitor is a substance that inhibits the growth of new blood vessels (angiogenesis). Some angiogenesis inhibitors are endogenous and a normal part of the body's control and others are obtained exogenously through pharmaceutical drugs or diet.
Quinazoline is an organic compound with the formula C8H6N2. It is an aromatic heterocycle with a bicyclic structure consisting of two fused six-membered aromatic rings,a benzene ring and a pyrimidine ring. It is a light yellow crystalline solid that is soluble in water. Also known as 1,3-diazanaphthalene,quinazoline received its name from being an aza derivative of quinoline. Though the parent quinazoline molecule is rarely mentioned by itself in technical literature,substituted derivatives have been synthesized for medicinal purposes such as antimalarial and anticancer agents. Quinazoline is a planar molecule. It is isomeric with the other diazanaphthalenes of the benzodiazine subgroup:cinnoline,quinoxaline,and phthalazine. Over 200 biologically active quinazoline and quinoline alkaloids are identified.
Photosensitizers are light absorbers that alter the course of a photochemical reaction. They usually are catalysts. They can function by many mechanisms,sometimes they donate an electron to the substrate,sometimes they abstract a hydrogen atom from the substrate. At the end of this process,the photosensitizer returns to its ground state,where it remains chemically intact,poised to absorb more light. One branch of chemistry which frequently utilizes photosensitizers is polymer chemistry,using photosensitizers in reactions such as photopolymerization,photocrosslinking,and photodegradation. Photosensitizers are also used to generate prolonged excited electronic states in organic molecules with uses in photocatalysis,photon upconversion and photodynamic therapy. Generally,photosensitizers absorb electromagnetic radiation consisting of infrared radiation,visible light radiation,and ultraviolet radiation and transfer absorbed energy into neighboring molecules. This absorption of light is made possible by photosensitizers' large de-localized π-systems,which lowers the energy of HOMO and LUMO orbitals to promote photoexcitation. While many photosensitizers are organic or organometallic compounds,there are also examples of using semiconductor quantum dots as photosensitizers.
Stuart Schreiber is an American chemist who is the Morris Loeb Research Professor at Harvard University,a co-Founder of the Broad Institute,Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator,Emeritus,and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine. He currently leads Arena BioWorks.
The Willard Gibbs Award,presented by the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society,was established in 1910 by William A. Converse (1862–1940),a former Chairman and Secretary of the Chicago Section of the society and named for Professor Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) of Yale University. Gibbs,whose formulation of the Phase Rule founded a new science,is considered by many to be the only American-born scientist whose discoveries are as fundamental in nature as those of Newton and Galileo.
Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist known for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases,who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches,which assess protein function first and then assess its role in development and disease. In particular,Fuchs researches skin stem cells and their production of hair and skin. She is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at The Rockefeller University.
Cystine/glutamate transporter is an antiporter that in humans is encoded by the SLC7A11 gene.
Eribulin,sold under the brand name Halaven among others,is an anti-cancer medication used to treat breast cancer and liposarcoma.
Nutlins are cis-imidazoline analogs which inhibit the interaction between mdm2 and tumor suppressor p53,and which were discovered by screening a chemical library by Vassilev et al. Nutlin-1,nutlin-2,and nutlin-3 were all identified in the same screen;however,Nutlin-3 is the compound most commonly used in anti-cancer studies. Nutlin small molecules occupy p53 binding pocket of MDM2 and effectively disrupt the p53–MDM2 interaction that leads to activation of the p53 pathway in p53 wild-type cells. Inhibiting the interaction between mdm2 and p53 stabilizes p53,and is thought to selectively induce a growth-inhibiting state called senescence in cancer cells. These compounds are therefore thought to work best on tumors that contain normal or "wild-type" p53. Nutlin-3 has been shown to affect the production of p53 within minutes.
Salinomycin is an antibacterial and coccidiostat ionophore therapeutic drug.
Stephen James Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered one of the founders of bioinorganic chemistry,studying the interactions of nonliving substances such as metals with biological systems. He is also considered a founder of metalloneurochemistry,the study of metal ions and their effects in the brain and nervous system. He has done pioneering work in understanding protein structure and synthesis,the enzymatic functions of methane monooxygenase (MMO),and the mechanisms of cisplatin anticancer drugs. His work has applications for the treatment of cancer,for bioremediation of the environment,and for the development of synthetic methanol-based fuels.
Ming-Ming Zhou is an American scientist whose specification is structural and chemical biology,NMR spectroscopy,and drug design. He is the Dr. Harold and Golden Lamport Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacological Sciences. He is also the co-director of the Drug Discovery Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai Health System in New York City,as well as Professor of Sciences. Zhou is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The duocarmycins are members of a series of related natural products first isolated from Streptomyces bacteria in 1978. They are notable for their extreme cytotoxicity and thus represent a class of exceptionally potent antitumour antibiotics.
mTOR inhibitors are a class of drugs used to treat several human diseases,including cancer,autoimmune diseases,and neurodegeneration. They function by inhibiting the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR),which is a serine/threonine-specific protein kinase that belongs to the family of phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI3K) related kinases (PIKKs). mTOR regulates cellular metabolism,growth,and proliferation by forming and signaling through two protein complexes,mTORC1 and mTORC2. The most established mTOR inhibitors are so-called rapalogs,which have shown tumor responses in clinical trials against various tumor types.
Oxytosis/ferroptosis is a type of programmed cell death dependent on iron and characterized by the accumulation of lipid peroxides,and is genetically and biochemically distinct from other forms of regulated cell death such as apoptosis. Oxytosis/ferroptosis is initiated by the failure of the glutathione-dependent antioxidant defenses,resulting in unchecked lipid peroxidation and eventual cell death. Lipophilic antioxidants and iron chelators can prevent ferroptotic cell death. Although the connection between iron and lipid peroxidation has been appreciated for years,it was not until 2012 that Brent Stockwell and Scott J. Dixon coined the term ferroptosis and described several of its key features. Pamela Maher and David Schubert discovered the process in 2001 and called it oxytosis. While they did not describe the involvement of iron at the time,oxytosis and ferroptosis are today thought to be the same cell death mechanism.
György Kéri was a Hungarian biochemist,professor and Doctor of Biological Sciences (D.Sc.). His major field of research was signal transduction therapy and he participated in the development of novel drug discovery technologies and drug candidates that entered the clinical development process.
Erastin is a small molecule capable of initiating ferroptotic cell death. Erastin binds and activates voltage-dependent anion channels (VDAC) by reversing tubulin's inhibition on VDAC2 and VDAC3,and functionally inhibits the cystine-glutamate antiporter system Xc−. Cells treated with erastin are deprived of cysteine and are unable to synthesize the antioxidant glutathione. Depletion of glutathione eventually leads to excessive lipid peroxidation and cell death.
Tal Danino is a synthetic biologist and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University.
Yang Dan is a Hong Kong-Chinese chemist and chemical biologist. She is the chair professor in both School of Life Sciences and School of Science in the Westlake University. She was awarded the TWAS Prize for Chemistry in 2010 and the Young Woman Scientist Prize of China in 2011.
Brent Stockwell publications indexed by Google Scholar