Richard O. Hynes

Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Primary Section: 22, Cellular and Developmental Biology
Secondary Section: 41, Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology
Membership Type:
Member (elected 1996)

Biosketch

Richard Hynes is Daniel K.Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Koch Institute and Biology Department at MIT . He was formerly Head of the Biology Department and Director of the Center for Cancer Research at MIT  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Member of the US National Academies of Science and Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Dr. Hynes has a BA/MA in Biochemistry from Trinity College, Cambridge, and PhD in Biology from MIT.  After postdoctoral fellowship at ICRF, London, where he discovered fibronectin, he returned to MIT as a founder member of the Center for Cancer Research, continuing his research on extracellular matrix, integrins and cell adhesion and their effects on normal development, physiology and pathology, most recently cancer metastasis.   He was an HHMI Investigator for 30 years and has received the Gairdner International Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pasarow Award and the E.B. Wilson medal from the ASCB and has served as President of the American Society for Cell Biology and Governor of the Wellcome Trust., UK and co-chaired the NAS committees establishing Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Human Genome Editing. 

Research Interests

The Hynes lab currently focusses on cellular interactions, through cell surface receptors such as integrins, with the extracellular matrix (ECM) and their involvement in cancer progression, most especially metastasis. ECM plays key roles in the tumor microenvironment, contributing to multiple steps in metastatic spread and in tumor resistance to therapies. The increasing understanding of the roles of ECM proteins and their receptors, including integrins, offer numerous possibilities for intervention in treating cancer as well as other pathologies such as thrombosis and many involving fibrosis.

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