Matthew Vander Heiden

The newest member of the Koch Institute faculty is Dr. Matthew "Matt" G. Vander Heiden, M.D., Ph.D.. Dr. Vander Heiden completed his medical degree at University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine where he also obtained a Ph.D from the committee on immunology. Dr. Vander Heiden received a B.S., Biological Chemistry, University of Chicago and was the salutatorian at Port Washington High School, Port Washington, WI. For clinical training Dr. Vander Heiden completed at Internal Medicine Residency, Brigham & Women's Hospital here in Boston and a Hematology-Oncology Fellowship, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Massachusetts General Hospitals. Over the last several years Dr. Vander Heiden, while serving as an Instructor in Medicine at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, has worked a Post-Doctoral fellow is the Harvard Medical School laboratory of Lewis Cantley where he has made remarkable contributions in the rapidly advancing field of cancer metabolism. A field that began in 1924, by the notable German biochemist Otto Warburg who first proposed the idea that cancer cells may be united in having a common set of molecules not found in most other cells. Warburg based this hypothesis on his observation that cancer cells produce large amounts of lactic acid, regardless of whether they were growing in the presence or absence of oxygen. Eighty years later, Dr. Vander Heiden and his colleagues are now clarifying what Warburg's discovery truly implied. The simple and elegant fact that metabolism of cancer cells, and indeed of all proliferating cells, is largely directed toward the synthesis of cellular building blocks from the breakdown products of glucose; a unique and "targetable" difference. In particular, Dr. Vander Heiden's research has focused on the M2 isoform of the glycolytic enzyme pyruvate kinase (PK-M2), which is expressed during embryonic development and at high levels in cancer cells. All tumors and cell lines studied to date express exclusively PK-M2, while normal adult tissues express another isoform of pyruvate kinase. They have demonstrated that PK-M2 expression is required for aerobic glycolysis and that PK-M2 is required for human cancer cells to form tumors in vivo. Efforts to understand how metabolism is reprogrammed to facilitate accumulation of biomass have allowed Dr. Vander Heiden's team to rediscover a previously unappreciated pathway for glucose metabolism in proliferating cells. Together these seminal (and revisited) observations have already contributed to a rush to build new tests, imaging tools and drugs that may, some day soon, target a cancer's true Achilles' heal; metabolism.