Alexander Levitzki

Alexander Levitzki (b. 1940) is an Israeli biochemist who is a Professor of Biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.^[1]

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Birth and education

Alexander Levitzki was born in 1940 in Israel. He completed his M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science, in 1968. From 1968 to 1971, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of California at Berkeley in California, with Professor D. E. Koshland, Jr.

Academic career

In 1970, Alexander Levitzki became a Senior Scientist at the Department of Biophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science. Then, he became an associate Professor at the same institute.

In 1976, he became an associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1976, he was appointed Professor of Biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been Visiting Scientist at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in California. He is also a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Research

Alexander Levitzki is known for developing specific chemical inhibitors of cancer-induced protein kinases. He demonstrated that such an inhibitor to Bcr-Abl kinase induces death of chronic myeloid leukemia cells. This is currently used, with great success, for therapy of patients afflicted by this disease.

In 2005, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine for "pioneering signal transduction therapy and for developing tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer and a range of other diseases".^[2]

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