World-renowned cell researcher dedicated life to new discoveries
TORONTO — Tony Pawson, a world-renowned Canadian researcher whose discovery about how cells talk to each other transformed scientists’ fundamental understanding of cancer and many other diseases, has died. He was 60.
Pawson, chair of molecular oncology at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, died late Wednesday of an undisclosed cause.
His death has stunned and saddened the scientific community both in Canada and abroad, longtime colleagues said Friday.
“Tony’s passing represents a profound loss for Canada’s scientific community and will be felt throughout the international medical research world,” Dr. Jim Woodgett, director of the institute, said in a statement.
“All of us here at Mount Sinai Hospital are deeply saddened. He was an extraordinary colleague, brilliant mind and dear friend. His research team ... has revolutionized our understanding of how cells work and his legacy will always be felt here as we continue to pursue his lifelong dedication to discovery.”
Fellow scientist and close friend Alan Bernstein, head of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, said Pawson would have been a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology because his sentinel research laid the groundwork for discoveries by other scientists.
In 1990, Pawson’s team first reported on key protein interactions involved in “signal transduction” — or how cells communicate and control each other’s behaviour through chemical signals. Miscommunication among cells can give rise to such diseases as cancer, diabetes or heart disease.
“Tony really uncovered a fundamental mechanism by which cells in our body communicate with each other,” said Bernstein. “And breakdowns in that mechanism — whether it’s in cancer or diabetes or in neurological or embryonic development — quite often involve this mechanism that Tony discovered.”
Pawson’s insight paved the way for the development of designer medications such as Gleevec, a drug that locks out an abnormal cell signal that causes chronic myelogenous leukemia, a form of blood cancer. Other drugs based on the same principle are also in the works.
“He’s just been transformative in Canadian science and really had an impact on how patients are treated currently and will be in the future,” said Sian Bevan, director of research at the Canadian Cancer Society, which helped fund much of his work. “We’re really saddened that we’ve lost one of our great scientists.”