UCSF's Frank McCormick: A Multidisciplinary Focus on Cancer

摘要

Most research scientists consider themselves fortunate if they manage one fruitful career in the course of a lifetime. At last count, Frank McCormick was on his fourth. His early work was on DNA tumor viruses and led him to some of the earliest studies on the p53 tumor suppressor. In the 1980s, he moved into signal transduc-tion and the molecular basis of cancer and helped elucidate the control mechanisms of ras, the most frequently activated human oncogene, which plays a causal role in some 30% of all human cancers. McCormick's third incarnation, which has him in the news lately, is as the founder of Onyx Pharmaceuticals and creator of a promising technique to harness mutant cold viruses to attack tumors. Finally, last year, McCormick was lured back to academia by the University of California at San Francisco, which appointed him director of the new UCSF Cancer Center.