The University of Pittsburgh will give biologist Dr. David M. Sabatini the 2017 Dickson Prize in Medicine.
Sabatini teaches biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a senior associate Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University and is a member of the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, according to an announcement. He also belongs to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Sabatini, with his team at the Whitehead Institute, observes what processes control how cells grow. Since he found the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) processes, the testing that he and his team have done has helped determine what parts of mTOR are and what they do inside cells and organisms. He found mTOR pathways found many ways that mTOR proteins play a role in cancer, diabetes and aging.
Sabatini will receive the award at Science 2017 on Oct. 18-20 at Oakland's Alumni Hall and the Wyndham Pittsburgh University Center.
Sabatini also studies what metabolism does in cancer and how food limits are managed when tumors are formed. He and his team are also using technology they built to give researchers a better way to analyze mammal genes function.
