Vincent Cryns

    Professor of Medicine

    Nutritional intervention to prime tumor response to drugs

    Education

    • Harvard Medical School – MD
    • Massachusetts General Hospital School – Internship in Internal Medicine
    • Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Hanover, New Hampshire – Residency in Internal Medicine
    • Massachusetts General Hospital School – Clinical Fellowship in Medicine, Endocrine
    • Harvard Medical School – Research Fellow in Medicine

    Dr. Cyrns is a physician-scientist who focuses on understanding how cancer cells adapt to and survive metabolic stress caused by their rapid growth. He and colleague Richard Anderson, PhD, lead a team of scientists together with who have discovered new signaling pathways (“third messengers”) in the nucleus of cells that protect tumor cells from cellular stress.

    Drs. Cryns and Anderson investigate how lipid second messengers typically associated with membranes modify the functions of proteins inside the nucleus of cells, so-called “third messenger” pathways. Our joint lab is the Third Messenger Lab.

    One example of the third messenger pathway is the discovery that second messengers are linked to the p53 tumor suppressor protein to activate Akt in the nucleus and protect cells from dying, directly linking the p53 and Akt pathways for the first time.