Profile of Susan Band Horwitz
- Tinsley H. Davis, Freelance Science Writer
Taxol is one of the world’s most successful cancer drugs, but it has not always held the spotlight. Up until 30 years ago, little was known about how Taxol (generic name, paclitaxel) exerted its antitumor effects. But in the 1970s, molecular pharmacologist Susan Band Horwitz investigated and explained Taxol’s mechanism of action, work that was of interest to cell biologists and pharmacologists but almost completely ignored by the medical community and pharmaceutical industry at the time. Her research eventually led to the widespread clinical use of Taxol and its application in cancer therapeutics worldwide.
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005, Horwitz is Distinguished University Professor and Rose C. Falkenstein Professor of Cancer Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY). She continues to study Taxol, the molecule whose unique and elegant structure first intrigued her 30 years ago. Taxol’s antitumor activity is based on its ability to stabilize microtubules in tumor cells, promoting mitotic arrest and cell death. In her Inaugural Article in this issue of PNAS (1), Horwitz and her colleagues analyzed the structural changes in both β- and α-tubulin upon microtubule stabilization by Taxol. The work clearly demonstrates that this methodology can aid in the study of conformational effects induced by small molecules, such as Taxol, on microtubules.
History to Science
Horwitz was born in 1937 in Cambridge, MA. Growing up, she “was quite interested in history,” Horwitz says, and did not think of science as a career option. She first began to develop an interest in science at Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA), which she entered in 1954 with the intent to major in history. Having attended a small high school in a suburb of Boston, Horwitz found that Bryn Mawr “opened up a whole new world for me,” she says. After taking her first …
