Keynote Address

Keynote Speaker: Nathaneal S. Gray, Ph.D.

Dr. Nathanael Gray is the Nancy-Lurie Marks Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.  Nathanael leads the Dana Farber Program in Chemical Biology and manages a research laboratory.

Nathanael has pioneered pharmacological approaches to inhibit protein kinases that become dysregulated in cancer and other diseases. His development of innovative strategies for kinase inhibition has enabled discovery of first‐in‐class inhibitors that have become widely used as tools to elucidate kinase function in biological systems and resulted in the development of clinical candidates and approved drugs. Nathanael also pioneered the development of covalent compounds that target unique cysteine residues to achieve selectivity across the approximately 520 human kinases. He developed the first ATP‐competitive inhibitors of mTOR that were used to discover that mTOR regulates protein translation and cell growth more profoundly than previously anticipated. Following this, Dr. Gray developed the concept of ‘mutant‐selective’ kinase inhibitors which resulted in the development of a new class of EGFR inhibitors currently approved for the treatment of lung cancer. Nathanael has contributed to the field of small molecule induced protein degradation and has developed new strategies and approaches for efficiently discovering new degrader molecules.

These contributions have been recognized through numerous awards including the National Science Foundation’s Career award in 2007, the Damon Runyon Foundation Innovator award in 2008, the American Association for Cancer Research for Team Science in 2010 and for Outstanding Achievement in 2011, the American Chemical Society award for Biological Chemistry in 2011, and the Nancy Lurie Marks endowed professorship in 2015.