Renowned Biologist Awarded Pitt's Dickson Prize in Medicine

Noted Biologist David M. Sabatini, M.D., Ph.D., To Receive Pitt’s Dickson Prize in Medicine at Science 2017
PITTSBURGH, July 14, 2017 – A researcher who discovered a key cellular regulatory metabolic pathway known as mTOR and whose subsequent research has revealed several roles that individual proteins in this pathway play in cancer, diabetes and aging will receive the University of Pittsburgh’s 2017 Dickson Prize in Medicine.
David M. Sabatini, M.D., Ph.D., will accept the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s most prestigious honor during Science 2017, a showcase of the region’s latest research in science, engineering, medicine and computation that will be held from Oct. 18 to 20 at Alumni Hall in Oakland and at the adjacent Wyndham Pittsburgh University Center. Dr. Sabatini is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a senior associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. He also is a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“Dr. Sabatini is an extraordinarily innovative and imaginative scientist,” said Arthur S. Levine, M.D., Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of Medicine. “His seminal discoveries concerning the mTOR pathway came when he was a 24-year-old medical student researcher. In the years since then, he has been a leader in identifying fundamental molecular mechanisms in human biology and elucidating the molecular basis of human disease.”

Dr. Sabatini and his lab at the Whitehead Institute study the basic mechanisms that regulate cell growth, the process whereby cells and organisms accumulate mass and increase in size. These pathways are often disordered in human diseases. Since the discovery of the regulatory metabolic pathway known as mTOR (for mechanistic target of rapamycin), work ...

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