Anton M. Bennett, recently named as the Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Pharmacology, focuses his research on understanding how a family of enzymes known as protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) regulate cell signaling.
PTPs function to remove phosphate groups from proteins. Bennett seeks to understand how PTPs integrate cellular cues that control signaling pathways that regulate cell growth, differentiation and other cellular functions. When the regulation of phosphate group removal by PTPs on proteins is disrupted, this can cause disease in humans. As such, PTPs have been directly linked to a variety of human diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Bennett investigates how PTPs are involved in various human diseases and whether, once identified, if these PTPs can be targeted for therapeutic purposes. Currently, Bennett’s laboratory is actively pursuing targeting PTPs for therapeutic intervention of rare diseases, such as dystrophic muscle disease and congenital heart disease.
A graduate of Liverpool John Moores University (Liverpool, England), Bennett earned an M.S. and Ph.D. in experimental pathology from New York Medical College. After postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he began his academic career at the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor of pharmacology. Prior to his new appointment, he was a full professor of pharmacology and of comparative medicine. He also serves as director of minority affairs for the Yale Graduate Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences and co-director of the Yale Program in Integrative Cell Signaling and Neurobiology of Metabolism.
Bennett’s research has been supported by grants from federal agencies and private foundations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. He is a widely published contributor to peer-reviewed journals. He serves on the editorial boards of Biochemical Journal and Molecular and Cellular Biology, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Igia Pharmaceuticals, which he co-founded.
The Yale professor’s honors include the Blavatnik Innovation Award, the Sweibelius Cancer Research Award, and the Burroughs Wellcome New Investigators Award.
