Tony Kouzarides
Tony Kouzarides is a Royal Society Professor at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Gurdon Institute. He did his PhD at the University of Cambridge and postdoctoral work at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology on the cancer inducing potential of human cytomegalovirus. He then went to NYU Medical Center in New York where he defined the functions of the c-Fos leucine zipper dimerisation domain. He returned to Cambridge to lead a research group at the Gurdon Institute where he has been ever since.Tony’s group is focused on understanding the role of chromatin modifications in transcription and their involvement in cancer. His laboratory identified one of the first enzymes that modify chromatin, the acetyltransferase CBP and discovered many other chromatin modification pathways including deimination, proline isomerisation and tyrosine phoshorylation. His work lead to the identifcation of proteins that bind to methyl-lysines (HP1) and characterized proteins that bind to acetyl-lysines (BET). Many links between chromatin modifications and cancer have been demonstrated by his group, which most recently defined a therapeutic potential for a BET inhibitor in the treatment of MLL-leukaemias.
He is a member of the Science Strategy Advisory Group for Cancer Research UK and on the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) for the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (Greece), the Centre for Genomic Research (CRG, Spain) the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program (PEBC, Spain) and the Andalusian Center for Molecular Biology and Regenerative Medicine (CABIMER, Spain).
Tony is the founder and director of a charity “Vencer el Cancer” (Conquer Cancer), based in Spain which raises public funds for cancer research and drug discovery. He is a founder of Chroma therapeutics, a UK based cancer drug discovery company which has as its focus enzymes that modify chromatin. He is a founder and director of Abcam plc, a publicly trading antibody reagents company.
He was elected member of the European Molecular Biology organization in 1998 and the British Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001. He is invited to give over 30 talks a year around the world and has over 140 publications in research journals. He has been awarded the Wellcome Trust medal for research in biochemistry related to medicine (UK), the Tenovus Medal (UK), the Bodossaki Foundation prize in Biology (Greece) and the Bijvoet Medal (Holland).
On a group retreat, Macon, France, 2003.
Hogwarts reunion, Porto 2010.
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