Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Kevan Shokat, UC San Francisco
Credits: Noah Berger, UCSF and Kevan Shokat biographical page
About the Seminar
“Overcoming the Undruggable Nature of the Most Common Human Oncogene: K-Ras”
Somatic mutations in the small GTPase K-Ras are responsible for approximately 30% of
human cancers and are generally associated with poor response to standard therapies. The mutations in K-Ras were identified in the early 1980’s but it took almost four decades for the first drugs targeting the protein to be approved. The long delay was a result of the apparent lack of a drug binding pocket on K-Ras despite detailed structural and biochemical characterization of the protein, leading to it being referred to as “undruggable.” This view changed when a chemical strategy based on targeting the K-Ras (G12C) mutant common in lung cancer was successful in identifying a druggable pocket in 2013. This finding led eight years later to the approval of two new medicines for patients with K-Ras (G12C) lung cancer, sotorasib and adagrasib. One current challenge in K-Ras drug development is development of agents to inhibit the more frequent K-Ras (G12D) and K-Ras (G12V) versions found in colon and pancreatic cancer. The other challenge is drug resistance which is faced by all targeted cancer therapies including the new K-Ras (G12C) directed drugs. In this lecture I will provide a perspective on challenges and opportunities of newly developed K-Ras targeting drugs.
About the Speaker
Kevan M. Shokat is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco and Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College in 1986, his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at UC Berkeley with Professor Peter Schultz and carried out post-doctoral work in cellular immunology at Stanford University with Professor Chris Goodnow. Kevan’s research group is focused on the discovery of new small molecule tools and drug candidates targeting protein/lipid kinases, GTPases, and RNA helicases. His laboratory utilizes the tools of synthetic organic chemistry, protein engineering, structural biology, biochemistry and cell biology. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (2010), the National Academy of Medicine (2011), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011). In 2023 he was awarded the Vollum Prize from Reed College, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery and the Sjöberg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for ‘discoveries that enable the inhibition of mutated K-Ras in cancer treatment’ and the Heath Memorial Award Lecture, from MD Anderson Cancer Center. In 2024, he was awarded the Edward E. Smissman Award by the ACS Medicinal Chemistry division and also the Hope Funds Award of Excellence for Basic Science. In 2025, he delivered The Harvey Lecture at The Rockefeller University in New York City and was awarded the NCI Alfred G. Knudson Award for Research Excellence in Cancer Genetics in addition to The Therapeutic Achievement Award for pioneering work in the field of chemical biology/genetics from Lund University, Sweden and the Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine. He was awarded the 2026 Centenary Award from The Biochemical Society. He has commercialized discoveries from his laboratory through co-founding several biotechnology companies including Intellikine, Araxes, Wellspring Biosciences, Kura Oncology, eFFECTOR Therapeutics, Mitokinin, Revolution Medicines, Erasca and Kumquat Biosciences.