Dr. Melanie Cobb, Professor of Pharmacology and Associate Director of Basic Research for the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and a luminary in molecular pharmacology, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious honorary societies in the world.

She joins the ranks of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Graham Bell, Bruce Springsteen, Jonas Salk, and other Americans who have been elected to the Academy for distinguished, enduring contributions over a wide range of disciplines. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) includes more than 250 Nobel Laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners among its members.

The election of more than 200 new members for 2019 was announced by the AAAS in mid-April.

Dr. Cobb leads UT Southwestern’s Cancer Cell Networks Program and headed a team that discovered one class of protein kinase enzymes that play critical roles in cancer development.

Melanie is a pioneer in protein kinase research who started multiple fields of study that are now pursued by hundreds of other scientists, said Dr. Elizabeth Goldsmith, Professor of Biophysics and Biochemistry at UT Southwestern. Many of the proteins that she discovered are now drug targets for major diseases.

Dr. Cobb came to UT Southwestern after finishing her postdoctoral work in 1983. She stayed in large part because her Chairman at the time, the late Dr. Alfred G. Gilman, a 1994 Nobel Laureate, was so supportive of her work.

He opened doors for me that led to important collaborations with leaders in the kinase field, including the Nobel Prize winner Ed Krebs. As you might imagine, collaborations such as these would have been extremely difficult to establish on my own, given my early career stage, Dr. Cobb said.

Dr. Cobb identified the first mammalian mitogen-activated protein kinases in the early 1990s. She purified them, isolated cDNAs encoding these proteins, and named them ERK1, ERK2, and ERK3, or ERKs. It was a meaningful breakthrough because Ras, an important protein involved in cell growth and differentiation, has a critical relationship with these kinases.

ERK1 and ERK2 are downstream of Ras, one of the most commonly mutated oncogenic proteins in human cancers, Dr. Cobb said. The Ras/ERK pathway is also essential in embryonic development – mutations upstream in the pathway account for a large number of human birth defects. It’s a crucial crossroad in intracellular signaling.

Dr. Cobb went on to identify more than a dozen other protein kinases, but downplays this innovative work as something that has become almost routine, as scientists can now pluck nearly any molecule they need from a database. She said those advances have enabled scientists to use systems approaches not possible earlier. Dr. Cobb said she still maintains a sharp focus on a mechanistic understanding of protein kinases themselves.

We’re still missing a lot of what might be described as details, but those details are basic fundamental mechanisms that will provide new insight once we identify them, she said. For example, we’re still trying to learn how ERK recognizes only a handful of protein substrates among the hundreds of possible proteins in a cell to carry out specific physiological responses.

Dr. Cobb is the 23^rd UT Southwestern faculty member elected to the AAAS. Others include Nobel Laureates Drs. Bruce Beutler, Michael Brown, and Joseph Goldstein.

Melanie is the exemplar of a UT Southwestern faculty member, said Dr. David Mangelsdorf, Chair of Pharmacology. She puts her heart and soul into everything she does, from her science to her mentoring, teaching, and institutional service. This is a most deserving honor.

What she really hopes the laurel will bring is what Dr. Gilman made possible for her: more collaboration with the nation’s best scientists.

Whenever your name is raised within the scientific community, the possibility of new collaborations and novel scientific directions can also emerge. Collaboration is what moves so much of this work forward, Dr. Cobb said.