Yves Pommier MD, PhD

Dr. Yves Pommier joined the NIH in 1981. He is the Chief of the Developmental Therapeutics Branch and Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology, a member of the NCI Center for Cancer Research Drug Development Collaborative (DDC), and Honorary Professor of the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Pommier received an NIH Merit Award for his role in elucidating the function of topoisomerases as targets for anticancer drugs and the NCI Director Award of Merit for "Pioneering work on the mechanism of topoisomerase and PARP inhibition and the discovery of novel biomarkers of the anticancer drug response".

Pommier has also received multiple Federal Technology Transfer Awards for discovering the mitochondrial topoisomerase TOP1MT and the importance of the ribonuclease activity of topoisomerases I, as well as novel DNA topoisomerase, HIV-1 integrase, and cell cycle checkpoint inhibitors. Three of his drugs are in clinical trials, and his molecular pharmacology studies led to the clinical development of Yondelis and the PARP inhibitors. He serves as Senior Editor for Cancer Research for the Translational Science section and was elected Chair for the 2004-2005 Gordon conferences on the Molecular Therapeutics of Cancer and for the 2016 and 2018 Gordon conferences on DNA Topoisomerases in Biology & Medicine. He is the founding organizer of the "International Conferences on Retroviral Integrase: Molecular Biology and Pharmacology" (1995, 2001, 2008, 2014, and 2017).

Dr. Pommier received the "Paul Ehrlich lecture award" from the French Society of Therapeutic Chemistry in 2005 based on his discovery of the Interfacial inhibition concept. He has authored over 700 publications and holds over 30 patents for inhibitors of DNA topoisomerases, tyrosyl-DNA phosphodiesterase, checkpoint inhibitors, and HIV-1 integrase. He led and developed the pharmacogenomic patient-derived cancer cell line CellMiner database for precision medicine. He discovered Schlafen 11 (SLFN11) as a dominant determinant of response to widely used anticancer agents. He has mentored over 60 M.D. and Ph.D. post-doctoral fellows, Howard Hughes Medical Institute trainees, Ph.D. graduate students, and students who went into medical and scientific academic positions, and pharmaceutical and editorial careers. Dr. Pommier was elected a fellow of the AAAS in 2017 and received the National Cancer Institute Director’s Award of Merit for “Pioneering work on the mechanism of topoisomerase and PARP inhibition and the discovery of novel biomarkers of the anticancer drug response”.