Dimitrios Anastasiou's Biography

Dimitrios Anastasiou, Programme Leader, MRC National Institute For Medical Research

Dimitrios obtained a B.Sc. in Molecular Biology (1st Class) from the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (now Structural & Molecular Biology), University College London, in 2001. His studies in London included an Industrial Placement year at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals (now GlaxoSmithKline) in Harlow, where he developed mass spectrometry-based methods for the study of protein post-translational modifications.

He then moved to Switzerland to pursue doctoral studies with Prof. Wilhelm Krek, first at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, and then at the ETH-Zurich, where he investigated molecular mechanisms that underlie the regulation of sirtuins, a class of NAD-dependent deacetylases with roles in metabolic regulation and ageing. For this work, Dimitrios obtained his PhD in Biochemistry magna cum laude from the University of Basel in 2006.

Since 2007, he has been in the lab of Prof. Lewis Cantley, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, as a Postdoctoral Fellow and, more recently, as an Instructor in Medicine. His work has focused on understanding metabolic reprogramming in cancer. He also contributed to the development of small molecule activators that target the glycolytic enzyme pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) as potential therapeutics.

Dimitrios started his independent research group as a Programme Leader at NIMR in October 2012.