After a good meal there is a great sense of satisfaction: the body knows it received food and changes metabolism, for example, it releases insulin to help your muscles absorb much needed glucose.

How does the body know that you just ate, and a great supply of nutrients is about to be delivered? Every cell in our body has a multiprotein complex called the mammalian target of rapamycin complex - mTORC1.

Amazingly, mTORC1 senses glucose, amino acids and lipids. In the presence of these nutrients, mTORC1 is activated and re-orchestrates all cellular physiology: cells shift from catabolic (breakdown) to anabolic (synthesis) metabolism. That’s right, after a good meal all our cells know that it’s time to accumulate protein, lipids and make more DNA in case the cell wants to divide.

mTORC1 controls cell division, survival and metabolism and makes sure all these functions happen in a healthy way. But because mTORC1 is such a cellular master regulator, cancer cells very often hijack mTORC1 and make it work permanently. The outcome is uncontrolled cell growth, proliferation, survival, and metabolism – the greatest hallmarks of cancer!

My research aims at deciphering what controls mTORC1, how cancer cells exploit mTORC1, and which drugs can be used to inhibit mTORC1 and treat human cancer.

I received my Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from the Medical School of the University of Lisbon, Portugal in 2008. My PhD research was awarded a prestigious Portuguese government fellowship which allowed me to conduct all my Ph.D. research at the lab of Dr. David M Sabatini, at the Whitehead Institute at MIT.

After my PhD I moved to New York City to pursue postdoctoral studies in Cancer Biology and Neuro-Oncologic Diseases at The Rockefeller University and Hunter College of the City University of New York. During that time I received a grant to complete a Master of Science program in Clinical and Translational Investigation at Weill Cornell Medicine.

I joined SFC in 2021. What an amazing place to teach, serve, and do research with very talented undergraduate students! In my current research, I keep a close collaboration with my former mentor Prof. David Foster of Hunter College and Weill Cornell Medicine. He was an outstanding mentor and now I try to be an outstanding mentor to my undergraduate researchers!

See Maria Serrano De Sousa Frias. Publications