David Sabatini

David M. Sabatini is an Associate Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Assistant Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and an Associate Member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research.

David and his colleagues study the basic mechanisms that regulate growth, the process whereby cells and organisms accumulate mass and increase in size. Growth control pathways are often deranged in human diseases, such as diabetes, and in cancers mediated by the common tumor suppressor PTEN. His current focus is on a cellular system called the mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) pathway, a major regulator of growth in eukaryotes. In addition to his work on growth control, David is developing and applying new technologies that facilitate the analysis of gene function in mammalian cells. He has developed ‘cell-based microarrays’ that allow researchers to examine the cellular effects of perturbing the activity of thousands of genes in parallel. David is also a founding member of The RNAi Consortium (TRC) of labs in the Boston area that is developing and using genome-scale RNA interference (RNAi) libraries targeting human and mouse genes.