Anthony R. Hunter
Wolf Prize Laureate in Medicine 2005
Anthony R. Hunter
Affiliation at the time of the award:
The Salk Institute, USA
Award citation:
“for the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation”.
Prize share:
Anthony R. Hunter
Alexander Levitzki
Anthony J. Pawson
Over recent decades, an understanding of the biological bases of cancers and the provision of rational therapies to combat them, has proved a major challenge for medical science. Two recipients of the 2005 Wolf Prize in Medicine, Professors Hunter and Pawson, have each independently contributed to an understanding of the tyrosine kinase signaling pathways in biology and the effect of their disruption on the development of certain cancers. The third recipient, Professor Levitzki, has pioneered the development of small molecule inhibitors of tyrosine phosphorylation that block the disrupted pathways associated with cancer and thus provide effective therapies.
Anthony R. Hunter’s contributions lie at the heart of signaling pathways and their disorders. He discovered that tyrosine phosphorylation is a fundamental mechanism for transmembrane-signal transduction in response to growth factor stimulation and that disregulation of such tyrosine phosphorylation, by activated oncogenic protein tyrosine kinases, is a pivotal mechanism utilized in the malignant transformation of cells.