Epidermal growth factor receptor after 40 years

John Kuriyan is currently the Dean of Basic Sciences at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University. He earned his PhD in 1986 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a post-doctoral fellow with Professors Martin Karplus (Harvard) and Gregory A Petsko (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). From 1987 to 2001 he was on the faculty of The Rockefeller University, New York, and from 2001 to 2023 he was Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley. Until 2023, he was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), having been appointed to HHMI in 1990.

Breakthroughs from Dr Kuriyan’s lab have included determining the auto-inhibited structures of several tyrosine kinases, including Abl and the Src family kinases, and elucidating the mechanism of allosteric activation of the kinase domains of the EGF receptor. His lab has also made fundamental contributions to understanding the structural basis for high-speed DNA replication.

Dr Kuriyan is a Foreign Member of The Royal Society, London, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Neil McDonald is a UK-based structural biologist who has made contributions to understanding the architecture and regulation of neurotrophic factor receptor assemblies, their signalling properties and the consequences of receptor mutation in human disease.

He has also contributed to understanding signalling pathways stimulated by neurotrophic receptors including G-actin-driven control mechanisms and polarity kinase networks involved in neuronal polarisation. He has contributed to several successful drug discovery programmes.

Dr Ferguson obtained a BA in Physics from Oxford University (Hertford College) and a PhD in Biological Chemistry from Yale University with Paul Sigler, with whom she determined some of the first Pleckstrin Homology domain structures. As a postdoc, she then determined the first unliganded, tethered structure of the EGFR extracellular region, and later – in her own lab at Penn – determined structures of the EGFR extracellular region in complex with therapeutic antibodies. After 13 years as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr Ferguson moved to Yale University in 2016, where she is a tenured Associate Professor of Pharmacology and member of the Yale Cancer Biology Institute. She continues to work on mechanisms of activation and inhibitor of receptor tyrosine kinases with a current focus on the invertebrate EGF receptors.

Michael J Eck MD, PhD is Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Dr Eck’s research centres on the structural biology of cell signalling and cancer. His research group uses biochemical and biophysical approaches, including X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, to study kinase regulation and to unravel mechanisms by which oncogenic mutations alter kinase activity and drug sensitivity. The Eck lab is working to develop novel, mutant-selective therapeutics targeting oncogenic kinases, including BRAF alterations in paediatric low-grade gliomas and other cancers, EGFR mutations in lung cancer, and JAK2 mutations in myeloproliferative disorders. 

Dr Eck earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in 1985, and his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in 1991. He trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr Stephen Harrison at Children’s Hospital, Boston and Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in 1996.

Roy S Herbst, MD, PhD is Ensign Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, Deputy Director for Yale Cancer Center (YCC), Chief of Medical Oncology, Director of Center for Thoracic Cancers, Assistant Dean for Translational Research, and Program Director, Master of Health Science - Clinical Investigation Track at Yale School of Medicine. He is the principal investigator (PI) of the Yale SPORE in Lung Cancer, PI of the YCC Advanced Training Program for Physician-scientists, PI on the NCI NCTN LAPS Grant, and PI of the Yale-AstraZeneca Alliance, which has 12 projects spanning various cancer types. 

Dr Herbst has led Phase I development of multiple targeted agents for non-small cell lung cancer, including gefitinib, cetuximab, bevacizumab, axitinib, atezolizumab, and anti-PD1/ PDL1 therapies. Additionally, he has helped bring targeted therapy to early-stage disease as the PI of the adjuvant osimertinib study (ADAURA). He co-led MD Anderson's BATTLE-1 effort, which led to the BATTLE-2 trial defining biometric as standard for the use of targeted therapies. He served as the national PI of the SWOG 0819 trial and held the role of founding PI for the NCI Lung Cancer Master Protocol (LungMAP, S1400) for a decade. He has more than 400 publications, and his work published in Nature was awarded Clinical Research Forum’s 2015 Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award.

Dr Herbst is a member of the National Cancer Policy Forum for which he organized National Academy of Medicine meetings focused on policy issues in personalised medicine and tobacco control. He is an elected member of the NCI Thoracic Malignancies Steering Committee and the Chair of the AACR Scientific Policy and Legislative Affairs Committee. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians. 

Most recently, Dr Herbst received the 2022 Giants of Cancer Care® award for Lung Cancer as one of their 25 scientific and advocacy leaders who have been instrumental over the course of the last 25 years in making significant advancements for patients.

Christine M Lovly, MD, PhD is a physician scientist, splitting her time between clinical care and laboratory research. Her research is directed at developing improved therapeutic strategies for clinically relevant molecular subsets of lung cancer, with a focus on EGFR mutant lung cancer. Dr Lovly is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. She serves on the Scientific Leadership Boards for the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer Research (where she also serves as Scientific Leadership Board Director), the LUNGevity Foundation, and the Lung Cancer Research Foundation. Dr Lovly serves several roles within American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), including being a member of the Board of Directors. She is a member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines panel for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and is co-chair of the ECOG-ACRIN Lung Biology Committee. In 2021, Dr Lovly was awarded the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group Young Investigator Award. In 2022, she was awarded the GO2 Foundation Asclepios Award honouring research pioneers in the fight to end lung cancer.

Dr Emilia Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver BC. Most recently, she completed her postdoctoral training with Dr Charles Swanton at the Francis Crick Research Institute, studying chromosomal instability and how it shapes lung cancer evolution.

She currently leads an environmental oncogenomics group. Her research program concerns how environmental exposures disrupt normal cells to accelerate the initiation of age-related disease states such as cancer. Her team performs multi-omic investigations of how environmental pollutants co-opt molecular mechanisms to shape tissue landscapes into diseased states. This will be done with a view towards molecular disease prevention, revealing targets for screening and intervention.

Dr Daniel J Leahy is the former chair of the largest department in University of Texas at Austin’s College of Natural Sciences, the Department of Molecular Sciences. His research focuses on molecular mechanisms of cell signalling, examining the processes by which proteins and other molecules behave within living systems including molecular mechanisms that regulate growth in normal and malignant cells. Dr Leahy’s work on one family of signalling molecules—the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and human epidermal growth factor reception 2 (HER2)—has contributed to our understanding of how these molecules function in healthy people and in people with cancer. This research has influenced medical professionals’ strategies to treat cancers of the lung, breast, colon and gastric system. Before coming to University of Texas at Austin in 2016, he was a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1993-2015.

Chiara got her PhD in 2009 and after two postdoctoral positions in Copenhagen, Denmark, she started as Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale-funded research fellow at the University of Manchester (UoM), United Kingdom, in 2016. Since July 2023 Chiara is Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark with an honorary position at the UoM.

Chiara’s team studies the regulation of cellular signalling in several mammalian cell models, particularly breast cancer models including patient samples, using a multi-disciplinary approach. By integrating mass-spectrometry-based omics methods with bioinformatics and functional assays in vitro and in vivo, Chiara’s research focuses on how:

1. the cellular microenvironment affects signalling architecture, metabolism, and cell survival
2. the trafficking of Receptor Tyrosine Kinases from and to the plasma membrane regulates cellular responses

Chiara’s research aims at identifying and characterising signalling proteins with key roles in cell survival which can be targeted for personalised intervention in human diseases.

Professor Daniel Hochhauser is a medical oncologist specialising in the treatment of gastrointestinal cancer. His focus is on the investigation of the EGFR pathway in colorectal cancer and how this can modulate responses to anticancer therapy. 

Dr Pike has worked in the area of signalling for over 4 decades. She did her thesis work in the laboratory of Robert J Lefkowitz, where she studied G protein-coupled receptors. She then moved to the laboratory of Edwin Krebs where she initiated her work on the EGF receptor. Her work has been focused on understanding how ligand binding can be used to understand structural and functional changes in the EGF receptor. Her recent studies have examined how extracellular domain mutations in the EGF receptor alter the binding and signalling of the seven different EGF receptor ligands.