Charles Sawyers


Charles L. Sawyers is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who holds the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. HOPP is a program created in 2006 that comprises researchers from many disciplines to bridge clinical and laboratory discoveries.

Career

Sawyers received a BA from Princeton University in 1981 and an MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1985, followed by an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He became a HHMI investigator in 2002 while working at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center.
Sawyers works on molecularly targeted cancer drugs, with a focus on developing a new generation of treatment options for patients. He shared the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Brian J. Druker and Nicholas Lydon, for the development of the ABL kinase inhibitor imatinib for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia and the second generation ABL inhibitor dasatinib to overcome imatinib resistance. He also co-discovered the antiandrogen drugs enzalutamide, approved by the FDA in 2012, and apalutamide approved in 2019, both for treatment of advanced prostate cancer.
Sawyers' cancer research is discussed in the second episode of Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.

Significant positions

Sawyers served as President of the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2007 and of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2012. He was also appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board by President Obama in 2012, and has served on the Board of Directors of Novartis since 2013.

Memberships