Martin Mcmahon PhD

Dr. Martin McMahon was awarded a Ph.D. from King’s College, University of London, for studies on the mechanism of interferon action conducted with Drs. Ian Kerr and George Stark at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (London, UK) and Stanford University (Stanford, CA). In 1985, he joined J. Michael Bishop’s laboratory in the Hooper Foundation of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a post-doctoral fellow to study oncogenic protein kinases. In 1991, he established an independent research group at the DNAX Research Institute (now Merck Research Labs, Palo Alto, CA) working on RAF protein kinases.

From 1991-1998, Dr. McMahon pioneered the use of a new class of conditional oncoproteins to dissect the corrupting events that lead normal cells to develop aberrant properties of lethal cancer. In 1998, he was recruited to the faculty of the Cancer Research Institute of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center where he served as the Efim Guzik Distinguished Professor of Cancer Biology, Co-Leader of the Experimental Therapeutics Program and Director for Professional Education. In 2015, he joined the faculty of the Department of Dermatology and the Huntsman Cancer Institute of the University of Utah, as the Cumming-Presidential Professor of Cancer Biology and the Senior Director for Preclinical Translation.

Dr. McMahon’s translational cancer research program focuses on the mechanisms underlying the development of metastatic melanoma, lung and thyroid cancer. Although these malignancies are derived from distinct cell types, they share a striking number of common genetic alterations especially activating mutations in KRAS, BRAF, PIK3CA or CTNNB1. In addition, many of these tumors display alterations in tumor suppressors such as CDKN2A, PTEN or TP53. To do this, Dr. McMahon’s laboratory works with cultured human cancer-derived cells and with genetically engineered mouse models of human cancer. Such model systems have demonstrated considerable value in the design and evaluation of new diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic tools to treat patients with cancer.