Biography
Stuart L. Schreiber, Ph.D. is Director of Chemical Biology at and Founding Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where he is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is also the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995).
Dr. Schreiber was born February 6, 1956 and raised in Virginia by his parents Colonel Thomas and Gerrie Schreiber. He married Mimi Packman on August 9, 1981. After receiving a B.A. degree at the University of Virginia in June of 1977, he carried out graduate studies at Harvard University under the supervision of R. B. Woodward and Y. Kishi. Following completion of his doctoral studies, he joined the faculty at Yale University in May of 1981. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1984 and to Full Professor in 1986. In 1988, he returned to Harvard. In addition to his affiliations above, he is an associate member of the Harvard Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and a member of the Graduate Programs in Biophysics and Immunology at Harvard University. In 1997, he founded and directed the Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology, which in 2003 merged with MIT¿s Center for Genome Research as part of the founding of the Broad Institute.
Science and Technology
Dr. Schreiber is known for having developed systematic ways to explore biology, especially disease biology, using small molecules and for his role in the development of the field of chemical biology. He has discovered principles that underlie information transfer and storage in cells, specifically discoveries relating to signaling by the phosphatase calcineurin and kinase mTOR (demonstrating for the first time that drugs can result from the targeting of protein kinases and protein phosphatases), gene regulation by chromatin-modifying histone deacetylases, small-molecule dimerizers that activate cellular processes by enforced proximity, and small-molecule probes of extremely difficult targets and processes (e.g. transcription factors, oncogenes, protein/protein interactions, transdifferentiation) that directly relate to human disease. His work has contributed to diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) and discovery-based small-molecule screening in an open data-sharing environment, and it resulted in the development of the first public small-molecule screening database named ChemBank. His research has been reported in over 450 publications (H index = 111).
Society and the Economy
Three new anti-cancer drugs that target proteins discovered in the Schreiber laboratory using his small-molecule approach have been approved by the U.S. FDA: torisel (Wyeth) and afinitor (Novartis; both for renal cancer), which target mTOR (discovered using rapamycin in 1994) and vorinostat (Merck; for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma), which targets HDACs (HDAC1 discovered using trapoxin in 1996). Human clinical trials are underway using a small-molecule dimerizer-based drug (AP1903) to regulate vaccine therapy for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. In addition, proteins first shown by Schreiber to be targeted by a small molecule have been validated therapeutically by the FDA-approval process: tacrolimus (immunosuppression/1994; Schreiber¿s study of FK506) and bortezomib (multiple myeloma/2003; Schreiber¿s study of lactacystin), and the pharmaceutical industry has now invested over $100MM in DOS as a new means to discover drugs. Schreiber also extended chemical biology principles to medicine by participating in the founding of three public biopharmaceutical companies with a combined market cap of over $8B: Vertex Pharmaceuticals (1989), ARIAD Pharmaceuticals (1991) and Infinity Pharmaceuticals (2001), each of which has devised new therapeutic agents that are being tested in human clinical trials or used as FDA-approved drugs. |
