Nobel Laureate Who Discovered Molecule Essential to Life Visits Feinstein Institute

The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research today hosted Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse, PhD, as the institute's 11th Annual Distinguished Visiting Scientist. Dr. Nurse, a cell biologist, discovered a key regulator of the process by which cells make copies of themselves. He was awarded one-third of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this discovery, which has been critical to studying growth, development and cancer - a disease in which the cell-copying process malfunctions and allows cells to grow and divide uncontrollably.

"Technology is incredibly important but we should not be misled by the notion that information means understanding," Dr. Nurse told hundreds of researchers and physicians at North Shore University Hospital's Rust Auditorium. During the course of his work that led to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Nurse performed experiments that each took 18 months in the 1970s and 1980s but which can now be done with new technologies in less than one week with greater accuracy.

"The new technologies are yielding more information but you still have to get to the core of the problems. Keeping a simple-minded approach to experiments is very important nowadays," he said. It's how he came to discover key control mechanisms in the cell-copying process.All organisms consist of cells that multiply through cell division, originating from one single cell.

Before a cell can divide, it needs to grow in size, exactly duplicate all of its genetic material, and then separate that genetic material and evenly distribute it into the two daughter cells it's dividing into. All of these processes are carefully orchestrated in phases of what's called 'the cell cycle', and Dr. Nurse discovered a key molecule - called cyclin dependent kinase, or CDK - that drives the cell through the cycle. His work has led to a better understanding of how cancers develop as well as opened the door to new ways of treating the disease.

Within the cycle, if DNA is damaged or incompletely replicated, checkpoint controls halt progression to allow the cell time to repair the damage. These checkpoints, which involve CDK activity, can become defective and lead to the development of cancer. Since Dr. Nurse's discovery of CDK, researchers have found that various changes within the cell can dysregulate the activity of CDK molecules and a group of proteins (called cyclins) they work in tandem with. This altered CDK-cyclin activity can either drive or suppress the formation of cancers.Dr. Nurse conducted his groundbreaking research on the cell cycle in his native United Kingdom.

In 2003, he came to the United States to be president of The Rockefeller University, where he continues to study the molecular machinery that drives cell division. His distinguished lecture this afternoon on the cell cycle and how he made key discoveries that drive cancer research today bolstered interest among many of The Feinstein Institute scientists, especially Rosamaria Ruggieri, PhD, an assistant investigator who studies the intricacies of the cell cycle's surveillance system.

Dr. Ruggieri recently identified a potential new avenue for targeting cancer therapies by taking advantage of an inherent weakness in the cell-cycle checkpoints of cancer cells. The therapy would selectively kill tumor cells and leave healthy cells intact. She is investigating this further with a new grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Media Contact:
Christina Verni
(516) 562-1232
cverni@nshs.edu