Geffen School of Medicine presents award for excellence in basic science

Dr. David Sabatini, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist and associate director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, was honored by the  David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for pioneering discoveries of mechanisms that regulate cell growth, propelling research into potential treatments for cancer and other diseases. The medical school ’s dean, Dr. Kelsey Martin, presented Sabatini with the 2018  Switzer Prize on Dec. 13 before he delivered a high-energy lecture to a packed auditorium. Nearly 300 people attended, filling every seat and overflowing into the aisles of UCLA’s Neuroscience Research Building. Sabatini also received a $25,000 honorarium and a statuette.“David is an outstanding scientist who has made fundamental discoveries about cell growth that hold important implications for aging and neurodegeneration,” Martin said. “His research has spurred the development of new classes of drugs with the exciting potential to treat cancer and other diso rders.”Born and raised in New York, Sabatini is the son of Argentine immigrants and fellow scientists, David and Zulema, who watched proudly from the front row during his UCLA lecture.As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Sabatini identified mTOR, a central protein that turns cell growth on and off.  At the Whitehead  Institute and MIT, his laboratory uncovered both the molecules that control when mTOR is active and the molecules throug...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news