Speaker

Kevan is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF and a Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. Kevan received his undergraduate degree at Reed College, his PhD at UC Berkeley and did post-doctoral training at Stanford. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (2010), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011).  His lab is most well-known for drugging the "undruggable" oncogene K-Ras (G12C) in 2013. K-Ras was the first human oncogene to be discovered in 1982 and remained undrugged until work from the Shokat lab at UCSF.  In May of 2021 the drug sotorasib which binds to the pocket identified by Shokat on K-Ras (G12C) was approved for the treatment of lung cancer patients with this mutation.  The field of K-Ras drug discovery is expanding quickly to hunt for drugs to target the other K-Ras mutants such as those which drive colon and pancreatic cancers which collectively represent almost 20% of all cancer patients world-wide.

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