The American Chemical Society has just announced that Kevan is the winner of its 2011 Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry. Kevan’s research at UC San Francisco is dedicated to finding methods for identifying kinase proteins and their substrates. As the award announcement describes it, he “first caught the kinase bug as a postdoc in a Stanford University
immunology lab. One of his benchmates was trying to identify a kinase
that was seemingly tied up in a signaling pathway involved in the mouse
immune system. ‘You could tell that a kinase was involved but not which
one,’ Shokat recalls. ‘All you could do was start knocking out kinases’
in mice and seeing whether their immune system functioned as expected.
As a newly minted Ph.D. chemist, ‘I was struck by how imprecise the
available tools were.’ Although his research interests have broadened since then, he points out that much remains to be done, “there are still some 400 kinases left to go.”
