Charles Sawyers
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
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Primary Section: 41, Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2010)
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Biosketch
Charles L. Sawyers is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is the inaugural Chair of the GENIE (Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange) Steering Committee, a genomics and clinical data sharing consortium established in 2015 by the American Association of Clinical Research (AACR). In his laboratory, Sawyers studies mechanisms of cancer drug resistance with an eye toward developing novel therapies. He co-discovered the antiandrogen drug enzalutamide that was approved by the FDA in 2012 for treatment of advanced prostate cancer. He shared the 2009 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award 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. Sawyers is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board by President Obama and has served on the Board of Directors of Novartis since 2013. He received a BA from Princeton University in 1981 and an MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1985, followed by internal medicine residency at UCSF.
