John Blenis

About

Dr. John Blenis is the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Professor in Cancer Research, Associate Director for Basic Science at the Meyer Cancer Center, and a Professor of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also the graduate program director for the Department of Pharmacology. His laboratory, the Blenis Lab, investigates how cells sense and integrate cues to maintain cellular homeostasis, with a particular focus on understanding how cellular signaling and metabolism are hijacked by cancer cells to promote tumorigenesis and drug resistance. The lab also explores the links between aging, metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes, and cancer initiation and progression. Utilizing state-of-the-art technologies, Dr. Blenis's team observes and manipulates these pathways in cell-based and mouse models of cancer, with clinical translation of findings facilitated through collaborations with clinicians at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine. The Blenis Laboratory is part of the Meyer Cancer Center at WCM, a prominent cancer research institution in New York City. Dr. Blenis is affiliated with Tri-Institutional training programs involving Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the Rockefeller University, and participates in the Tri-Institutional PhD program in Chemical Biology and the MD-PhD Program.

Research topics

• Biology
• Cell biology
• Biochemistry
• Genetics
• Internal medicine
• Cancer research
• Chemistry
• Medicine
• Endocrinology
• Computational biology

Selected publications

• An atlas of substrate specificities for the human serine/threonine kinome

  Nature · 2023 · 685 citations

  . Here we used synthetic peptide libraries to profile the substrate sequence specificity of 303 Ser/Thr kinases, comprising more than 84% of those predicted to be active in humans. Viewed in its entirety, the substrate specificity of the kinome was substantially more diverse than expected and was driven extensively by negative selectivity. We used our kinome-wide dataset to computationally annotate and identify the kinases capable of phosphorylating every reported phosphorylation site in the hum…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Age-induced accumulation of methylmalonic acid promotes tumour progression

  Nature · 2020 · 244 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  . Here we show that metabolic alterations that occur with age can produce a systemic environment that favours the progression and aggressiveness of tumours. Specifically, we show that methylmalonic acid (MMA), a by-product of propionate metabolism, is upregulated in the serum of older people and functions as a mediator of tumour progression. We traced this to the ability of MMA to induce SOX4 expression and consequently to elicit transcriptional reprogramming that can endow cancer cells with agg…

  DOI

• The intrinsic substrate specificity of the human tyrosine kinome

  Nature · 2024-05-08 · 138 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Phosphorylation of proteins on tyrosine (Tyr) residues evolved in metazoan organisms as a mechanism of coordinating tissue growth 1 . Multicellular eukaryotes typically have more than 50 distinct protein Tyr kinases that catalyse the phosphorylation of thousands of Tyr residues throughout the proteome 1–3 . How a given Tyr kinase can phosphorylate a specific subset of proteins at unique Tyr sites is only partially understood 4–7 . Here we used combinatorial peptide arrays to profile the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• mTORC1 promotes cell growth via m6A-dependent mRNA degradation

  Molecular Cell · 2021 · 115 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Altered propionate metabolism contributes to tumour progression and aggressiveness

  Nature Metabolism · 2022 · 107 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Mitogenic and Oncogenic Regulation of ERK/RSK Signaling

  NIH · $740k · 1988–2029

• Mitogenic and Oncogenic Regulation of ERK/RSK Signaling

  NIH · $13.0M · 1988–2029

• Signal Transduction to P70 S6 Kinase 1

  NIH · $597k · 1995–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Lewis C. Cantley

  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

  193 shared

• Sarah‐Maria Fendt

  VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology

  121 shared

• Alfredo Csibi

  117 shared

• Marie Jose Blouin

  106 shared

• Michaël Pollak

  McGill University

  106 shared

• Gregory Stephanopoulos

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  106 shared

• Eric L. Bell

  105 shared

• Gary Bellinger

  105 shared

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Omar Abdel-Wahabh-118
• Ingo Mellinghoffh-105
• David Scheinbergh-102