For his work, Mickey Kosloff -- who this year received his Ph.D. in biological chemistry at the university's Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences -- is the recipient of one of this year's Kaye Innovation Awards, to be presented on May 27 at the university's 66th Board of Governors meeting. This is the tenth anniversary year for the awards.
Kosloff has analyzed the workings of the Ras protein that is found in all cells of the body. Mutant, defective Ras is involved in up to 30% of human cancers. In healthy tissue, Ras is a master switch controlling cell division and proliferation. It cycles between an "off" state that stops cell division, and an "on" state that drives cell division.
What occurs in the mutant Ras is that it loses its inherent enzymatic activity that enables it to be "turned off." The switch therefore remains stuck in the active ("on") state, thus driving the uncontrolled proliferation of "wild" cancer cells.
What Kosloff and other members of the research team headed by Kosloff's supervisor, Prof. Zvi Selinger, have done is to study G-proteins (and in particular the Ras protein within that group) to discover exactly what goes wrong with oncogenic, damaged Ras. Through combining intensive computational analysis of these proteins with an experimental methodology they called "substrate assisted catalysis," they were able to understand how the normal G-proteins turn themselves off and what goes wrong in the abnormal Ras. Importantly, they were also able to demonstrate that normal enzymatic activity can be restored to mutant, oncogenic Ras
A further stage of the work is now progressing for the design of chemical compounds to "rescue" mutant Ras proteins in vivo, thereby providing the basis for future antic-cancer drugs.
Kosloff, 34 and married, was born in Haifa and served in the intelligence corps of the Israel Defense Forces before commencing his studies in chemistry and biochemistry in the Amirim honors program at the Hebrew University. He subsequently earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in biochemistry at the university and is now planning to do post-gradate work at Columbia University in New York.
The Kaye Innovation Awards at the Hebrew University have been awarded annually since 1994. Isaac Kaye of England, a prominent industrialist in the pharmaceutical industry, established the awards to encourage faculty, staff and students of the university to develop innovative methods and inventions with good commercial potential, which have benefited or will benefit the university and society.