Tak wah mak biography of michael

In , Mak returned to Wisconsin to learn new techniques in the lab of Howard Martin Temin , who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in for his discovery of the enzyme reverse transcriptase. During the early s in Toronto, with his newly setup group, Mak was working on virology. Mak employed a technique called molecular subtraction, used by virologists, to attempt to identify the T-cell receptor, which was so elusive at the time it was referred to as the "Holy Grail of Immunology.

Davis identifying the receptor in mouse. In spite of offers from prestigious institutions around the world, Mak remained committed to Canada's scientific community. In , Mak received support from the world's largest independent biotech company, Amgen , to establish the Amgen Research Institute in Toronto. Financial support from Amgen resulted in his lab pioneering the use of knockout mice, [ 9 ] and as a result his lab generated one of the first knockout mice and has generated more knockout mice than any other lab in the world.

As of , Amgen-produced papers have been cited more than 40, times. The basic research in cancer conducted by Mak has been published in top international scientific journals and he has given several keynote addresses at cancer symposia across Canada and the United States. By , Mak had reached a high point in his career, when he and his team published their seminal findings on the function of CTLA-4 , [ 4 ] thus paving the road for Immunotherapy and Checkpoint inhibition as potential anti-cancer therapies.

From the early s, Mak concentrated his efforts on the emerging field of cancer metabolism.

Tak wah mak biography of michael

Mak, Lewis C. Cantley , and Craig B. Thompson together founded Agios Pharmaceuticals , a biotech pharmaceutical company whose sole purpose is to discover methods of targeting cancer metabolism. The trio have contributed immensely in a few years to what was originally a forgotten paradigm. The discovery of the involvement of particular enzymes such as PKM2, mutated IDH as well as novel oncometabolites such as 2-hydroxyglutarate in cancer development have once again brought cancer metabolism back to the forefront of cancer biology.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. He has work. About: Tak Wah Mak. Er ist chinesischer Herkunft. Tommy sees a killer T-cell coming and says his prayers: he knows that a killer T-cell is trained to kill anything that looks foreign. So the body kills off its best cops, which then makes it harder to fight AIDS and any other infection.

Most people with AIDS actually die of a common disease, such as a chest infection that would never kill some-one with a healthy immune system. Tak Mak was the son of a successful businessman in southern China. They were very well off and lived in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class district made up mainly of Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and British families.

They lived next door to the consulates of Norway and Denmark. He was the only Asian kid on his street, but like all the other boys he liked to play marbles in the dirt and kick soccer balls around. It helped that at school he was in a very bright group of about 20 kids. Most of them went to universities all over the world. Mak went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

He is still a senior scientist there today. After his discovery of the T-cell receptor he became a professor at the University of Toronto, and in he also became director of the Amgen Research Institute in Toronto, which develops, patents and markets transgenic mice — animals that carry immune-system genes transferred from human beings. During his years at Amgen, Mak led a team that produced 20 patented molecular discoveries for use in drug development.

As an immunologist and molecular biologist, Mak examines the structure and function of molecules and cells in the human immune system, which protects the body from microscopic dirt and disease. His current cancer research is aimed at finding a cure for breast cancer. These are mice with missing DNA instructions for making just one protein in the immune system.

But there is a systematic way to find out. Maybe the mailroom grinds to a halt. Now you know what John Smith does. Then you put John Smith back and you try the same thing with another person. Eventually you find out how the whole company works. Along with many other researchers around the world, Mak is using a similar process to understand the immune system.

The human immune system is very complicated and the following is just a very simple explanation of one major part. Macrophages are like combination reconnaissance and disposal units. Michael Ho Dr. David Lam Dr. Sim Fai Liu Dr. Hung-Tat Lo Prof. Mak Dr. Ken Ng Prof. Madalene C. Heng Dr. Ming K.