Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Associate Professor Michael Lukey is the recipient of the 2025 James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Faculty Award, an honor presented annually to an assistant or associate professor who has made a significant research contribution. Established by CSHL Trustee James M. Stone and his wife, Cathleen, the award recognizes accomplishments that advance CSHL’s mission of educating and empowering scientific pioneers today to make lives better tomorrow.
Lukey earned this year’s distinction for innovative research that is reshaping scientists’ understanding of cancer metabolism. Working with collaborators, his team discovered that the enzyme PSAT1 can sustain essential metabolic functions that keep cancer cells alive even when levels of a critical fuel source, glutamine, drop. Low glutamine levels can occur spontaneously in the microenvironment of aggressive tumors or as a consequence of targeted therapies. However, by providing a “backup system,” PSAT1 becomes an essential enzyme that enables cancer cells to survive under these metabolically stressful conditions.
The Lukey lab’s findings provide potential strategies for new cancer therapies that simultaneously disrupt both glutamine metabolism and cancer cells’ backup pathways. Their findings also help explain how cancer can endure in the face of single-agent metabolic therapies. With a combination therapy targeting both pathways, the lab saw much better success against hard-to-treat forms of cancer.
“This work was a team effort, with postdoc Yijian Qiu playing a leading role,” Lukey shared. “We are now building on these discoveries to advance this new therapeutic approach, and I am very grateful for the recognition and support provided by the Stone Award.”
CSHL congratulates Lukey on this transformative work.
Written by: Lisa Cruz, Vice President, Communications | [email protected] | 516-367-6846