mTOR inhibitors in cancer treatment

Leonidas C Platanias is Deputy Director of the Robert H Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University in Chicago (IL, USA). He is also Professor of Medicine and the Jesse, Sara, Andrew, Abigail, Benjamin and Elizabeth Lurie Professor of Oncology at Northwestern University Medical School. He has been in his current position since 2002. Prior to this position, he was Chief of the Section of Hematology/Oncology and Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently President of the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research (ISICR) and Associate Editor of the journal Leukemia & Lymphoma. He is a member of numerous professional societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the American Society of Hematology (ASH) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He has been member of several grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. His research is in the areas of targeting signaling cascades for the treatment of leukemias and in cytokine signaling in malignant cells. His laboratory has performed extensive studies on the role of mTOR complexes in myeloid leukemias and other malignancies and on the development of approaches to target mTOR pathways for the treatment of malignancies.