NEW ORLEANS--Andrew Hamilton of Guilford, Conn., will be honored August 24 by the world's largest scientific society for designing molecules that recognize and bind to other molecules--in some cases, turning off cancer growth. He will receive the 1999 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in New Orleans.
Hamilton, an organic chemist at Yale University, said he likes the challenge of designing molecules that can influence living systems. "We have to be able to design structures that can cross the cell membrane, interact with their target molecules, turn those signals on or off as necessary, and control the chemistry of a living organism in a very selective way," he explained.
The key to this control is a process called molecular recognition. "Just like we recognize a human face by how close the eyes are, or the hair, or other features," he said, "molecules use chemical features to recognize their particular target in the huge molecular soup of a cell."
Hamilton is particularly interested in applying these techniques to cancer treatment. In recent years, researchers have come to realize that most cancers begin with a breakdown in the switches that control cell growth. One such switch is a protein called Ras. Mutations, or mistakes, in the gene that codes for Ras account for more than 30 percent of all cancers, according to Hamilton.
When activated by an enzyme called farnesyltransferase, Ras signals a cell to grow. In Ras-derived cancers, deactivation is blocked so the growth switch remains stuck in the "on" position. Hamilton and his group are designing molecules that block farnesyltransferase--in effect, detouring the stuck switch. Some of these molecules have dramatically slowed the growth of human tumors in mouse models and are moving toward clinical trials in humans.
Hamilton says he was never a chemistry-set kid. "I was sports-mad growing up. It wasn't until much, much later that I came to appreciate chemistry. I think it was the puzzles that structures and mechanisms presented which intrigued me."
A nonprofit organization with a membership of nearly 159,000 chemists and
chemical engineers, the American Chemical Society publishes scientific journals
and databases, convenes major research conferences, and provides educational, science policy, and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in
Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
( http://www.acs.org )