Professor Douglas Hanahan

Douglas Hanahan, born in Seattle, Wash­ington, USA, received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1976), and a Ph.D. in Bio­physics from Harvard (1983). He worked at Cold Spring Harbor Labor­atory in New York (1978-88) ini­tially as a graduate student and then as a group leader. From 1988-2010 he was on the faculty of the Department of Bio­chem­istry & Bio­physics at UCSF in San Fran­cisco. Hanahan joined the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research as a Dis­tin­guished Scholar in January 2020. In addition, Hanahan is cur­rently Pro­fessor and Dir­ector of the Swiss Institute for Exper­i­mental Cancer Research within the School of Life Sci­ences at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Tech­nology Lausanne and Co-dir­ector of the new multi-insti­tu­tional Swiss Cancer Center Leman. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sci­ences (2007), the US Institute of Medicine (2008), the US National Academy of Science (2009), and EMBO (2010). Hanahan has also received an hon­orary degree from the Uni­versity of Dundee in the UK (2011) and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the AACR (2014).

The Hanahan laboratory’s research program is struc­tured around the use of genet­ically engin­eered mouse models (GEMMs) of mul­tistep de novo tum­ori­genesis to invest­igate the hall­marks of cancer—the many dis­tinct cap­ab­il­ities acquired by tumors and their con­stituent cells that are essential to the estab­lishment and pro­gression of cancers. The stra­tegic plan is to elu­cidate the func­tional and phen­o­typic mani­fest­a­tions, molecular and cel­lular mech­anisms, and reg­u­lation of hallmark capabilities—and to translate that know­ledge into clinical applic­a­tions, dia­gnostics and ther­apies. Cur­rently Hanahan group invest­igates several organ-spe­cific cancers, including ductal and neur­oen­do­crine pan­creatic cancers, cer­vical cancer, melanoma, meta­static breast cancer and glio­blastoma. The group also have a robust program exploring the mul­tiple mech­anisms of immune evasion employed by tumors and strategies to disable such defenses to boost immun­o­therapy and broaden its applicability.

Selected publications 

D. Hanahan. Hall­marks of Cancer: New Dimen­sions. Cancer Dis­covery. 2022-01-01. DOI : 10.1158/2159-8290.CD-21-1059. 

S. Saghafinia; K. Hom­icsko; A. Di Domenico; S. Wull­schleger; A. Perren, et al., D. Hanahan. Cancer Cells Retrace a Stepwise Dif­fer­en­ti­ation Program during Malignant Pro­gression. Cancer Dis­covery. 2021-10-01. DOI : 10.1158/2159-8290.CD-20-1637. 

Q. Zeng; I. P. Michael; P. Zhang; S. Saghafinia; G. Knott, et al., D. Hanahan. Syn­aptic prox­imity enables NMDAR sig­nalling to promote brain meta­stasis. Nature. 2019-09-26. DOI : 10.1038/s41586-019-1576-6. 

J. Huelsken; D. Hanahan. A Subset of Cancer-Asso­ciated Fibro­blasts Determines Therapy Res­istance. Cell. 2018. DOI : 10.1016/j.cell.2018.01.028. 

S. Saghafinia; M. Mina; N. Riggi; D. Hanahan; G. Cir­iello. Pan-Cancer Land­scape of Aberrant DNA Methyl­ation across Human Tumors. Cell Reports. 2018-10-23. DOI : 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.09.082. 

K. Shchors; A. Mas­saras; D. Hanahan. Dual Tar­geting of the Auto­phagic Reg­u­latory Cir­cuitry in Gliomas with Repur­posed Drugs Elicits Cell-Lethal Auto­phagy and Thera­peutic Benefit. Cancer Cell. 2015. DOI : 10.1016/j.ccell.2015.08.012. 

A. Sadanandam; C. A. Lys­siotis; K. Hom­icsko; E. A. Col­lisson; W. J. Gibb, et al., D. Hanahan. A colorectal cancer clas­si­fic­ation system that asso­ciates cel­lular phen­otype and responses to therapy. Nature Medicine. 2013. DOI : 10.1038/nm.3175. 

L. Li; D. Hanahan. Hijacking the Neuronal NMDAR Sig­naling Circuit to Promote Tumor Growth and Invasion. Cell. 2013. DOI : 10.1016/j.cell.2013.02.051. 

D. Hanahan; R. A. Weinberg. Hall­marks of Cancer: The Next Gen­er­ation. Cell. 2011. DOI : 10.1016/j.cell.2011.02.013. 

Find out more inform­ation on Pro­fessor Hana­han’s research and recent pub­lic­a­tions: https://​www​.epfl​.ch/​l​a​b​s​/​h​a​n​a​h​a​n​-​l​ab/

Organized by: 

Can­cerBio Summer School organ­izing team

Juha Klef­ström, Mariel Savelius, Krista Tuo­hinto, Meri Sieviläinen, James Clubb, Fernando Perez, Philipp Sergeev & Tatiana Kudling

Cancer IO team

Heidi Haikala, Juha Klef­ström & Mirjami Tran Minh