William Kaelin

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

William G. Kaelin Jr. runs a cancer-genetics laboratory jointly at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and he is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator probing how mutated tumor-suppressor genes drive malignancy. His signature contribution dissected the von Hippel-Lindau (pVHL) protein: Kaelin proved that pVHL acts as the recognition component of an E3 ubiquitin-ligase complex that tags the alpha subunit of hypoxia-inducible factor for proteasomal destruction only when oxygen is plentiful, thereby tying an inherited kidney-cancer syndrome to the body's molecular oxygen thermostat. That mechanistic insight earned him a third of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Gregg Semenza and Peter Ratcliffe, preceded by the 2016 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. The pVHL-HIF circuit he mapped became the druggable rationale behind belzutifan, an HIF-2-alpha antagonist now cleared for VHL-linked renal cell carcinoma. Beyond the bench, Kaelin sits on the board of directors of the pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly and counsels several oncology startups, while his grants flow from the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. This blend of hereditary-cancer biology and biopharma governance makes his group a prime buyer for ubiquitin-ligase assay kits, kidney-cancer cell-line panels and tumor-suppressor sequencing instrumentation.