BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Mastering mTOR

A conversation with mTOR pioneer David Sabatini

April 7, 2017 12:16 AM UTC

The master regulator mTOR has made its mark as the target of dozens of drugs and clinical candidates for diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes, but David Sabatini thinks its full therapeutic value won’t be realized until the molecule, which is involved in nearly every physiological process, can be modulated in a tissue-specific way.

Sabatini, who is a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, a professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, discovered mTOR as the target of rapamycin as a Ph.D. candidate at The Johns Hopkins University in the 1990s and has since been credited with the discovery of the two mTOR complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2. ...