Raymond J. Deshaies

Raymond J. Deshaies is a Professor and Executive Officer of Molecular Biology at the California Institute of Technology; an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-Founder of the pharmaceutical company Proteolix; and Co-Founder of the pharmaceutical company Cleave Biosciences. Deshaies’ career has focused on determining how cells destroy unwanted proteins. Over the years, it has become clear that ubiquitin, which tags unwanted proteins for elimination, plays roles in almost every important biological process. When a phosphate complex bound to a protein prevents cells from moving through the cell cycle in order to duplicate their DNA, the protein became a target for ubiquitin and therefore is destroyed. Removal of this protein permits the cell to progress to the next stage of its cycle. The Deshaies lab’s identification of this complex, called SCF, opened a new field of inquiry. For many proteins, the same phosphorylation that switches them on when certain signals are transmitted through the cell causes them to be modified with ubiquitin by SCF and then broken down. Although Deshaies has spent most of his career unraveling the mechanisms, functions, and regulation of ubiquitin ligases, he has been keenly aware of the connections between the ubiquitin system and human disease. Cancer cells depend heavily on this system to degrade abnormal proteins and might be more sensitive than normal cells to inhibitors of protein breakdown. The connection between Deshaies’ basic research and biomedical research led him to co-found two pharmaceutical companies, Proteolix and Cleave Biosciences, both focused on the development of cancer drugs that inhibit protein destruction. Deshaies has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Markey and Searle Scholar Awards and Burroughs-Wellcome and Beckman New Investigator Award; in 1999 he was selected as Young Investigator of the Year by the American Society for Cell Biology. He is an inventor on nine U.S. patents, many related to his work on the Ubiquitin-Proteasome System (UPS). Deshaies’s articles appear in prominent journals including Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in addition to his American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership.