Profile of Scott W. Lowe

Abstract

As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Scott Lowe became interested in cancer genetics. The phenomenon that drew his interest was called oncogene cooperation—the idea that it takes multiple oncogenes working together to turn a normal cell into a tumor cell. “That was an exciting concept because it could explain why the development of cancer in patients probably involved more than one mutation, and you could find certain combinations of oncogenes that, when introduced into normal cells, would collaborate to make the cell fully malignant,” says Lowe, now a professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “We became interested in the biological and mechanistic basis for why certain combinations of oncogenes interact,” he says. Scott W. Lowe. Image courtesy of Lynn Boss (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York). Those early questions would lead Lowe toward many landmark discoveries concerning how oncogenes interact to drive tumorigenesis and how the genotype of a cancer cell can dictate its response to cancer therapy. Over the ensuing years, he combined mouse models, genetic tools, and cancer genomics in innovative ways to elucidate how cancer mutations lead to tumor formation. Lowe describes some of his latest advances in his Inaugural Article (1). For his many discoveries in the field of cancer genetics, Lowe was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017. When Lowe started studying oncogenes, he encountered a seemingly counterintuitive result. Although the oncogenes made cells grow in an uncontrolled manner, they also caused them to die. Lowe hypothesized that the cells might have inbuilt mechanisms that can sense problems and eliminate themselves through the process of apoptosis. “Through the course of investigating that hypothesis, we stumbled across p53, which was a gene that is known to inhibit cancer,” he says. Lowe noticed that certain oncogenes could increase …