Craig Crews
Member of Yale faculty since 1995
Executive Director, Yale Center for Molecular Discovery
Research Interests
Research
Enzyme inhibition has proven to be a successful paradigm for pharmaceutical development, however, it has several limitations. As an alternative, for more than 20 years, the Crews lab has focused on developing Proteolysis Targeting Chimera (PROTAC), a new ‘controlled proteolysis’ technology that overcomes the limitations of the current inhibitor pharmacological paradigm. Based on an ‘Event-driven’ paradigm, PROTACs offer a novel, catalytic mechanism to irreversibly inhibit protein function, namely, the intracellular destruction of target proteins. This approach employs heterobifunctional molecules capable of recruiting target proteins to the cellular quality control machinery, thus leading to their degradation. A wide variety of targets (kinases, transcription factors, epigenetic readers) have been shown to be degradable with PROTACs at picomolar concentrations. Moreover, the PROTAC technology has been demonstrated with multiple E3 ubiquitin ligases, included pVHL, MDM2, and cereblon.
Education
B.A. University of Virginia, 1986
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1993
Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, 1993-95
Honors
Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005-
Bessel Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, 2005
Editor, Cell Chemical Biology (formerly Chemistry & Biology), 2008-2018
UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, 2014
Outstanding Investigator Award (R35), National Cancer Institute (NIH), 2015
Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry in Cancer Research, American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), 2017
Khorana Prize, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2018
Pierre Fabre Award for Therapeutic Innovation, 2018
American Cancer Society Professorship, 2019
Pharmacia-ASPET Award for Experimental Therapeutics, 2019
John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology, 2019-
Heinrich Wieland Prize, Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, 2020
Scheele Prize, Swedish Pharmaceutical Society, 2021
Honorary Doctoral Degree, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, 2021
Connecticut Medal of Technology, CT Academy of Science and Engineering, 2022
Bristol Myers Squibb Award in Enzyme Chemistry, American Chemical Society, 2023
Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine, Brandeis University, 2023
Emanuel Merck Lectureship Award, Technical Uni. of Darmstadt and Merck, KGaA, 2024
Kimberly Prize, Northwestern School of Medicine and the Simpson Querrey Institute for Epigenetics, 2024
IUPAC-Richter Prize in Medicinal Chemistry, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, 2024