Biography

Daniel Fisher (IGMM group leader, CNRS Montpellier, France), Inserm Director of Research (DR2), is an expert in biochemistry of the cell cycle. He graduated with first class honours from the University of Bath, UK, before undertaking a PhD at the University of Oxford, UK, with Sir Paul Nurse, FRS (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2001; discoverer of CDKs) from 1992-1996. During his thesis work, he founded the hypothesis of quantitative cell cycle control by CDK kinase activity levels. From 1996-1999 he undertook a postdoc with Marcel Dorée to study how different signalling pathways control CDK activation at M-phase onset. From 2000-2004, as a tenured scientist in the group of Marcel Méchali, he studied the interplay between cell proliferation and differentiation, using the Xenopus system and cultured pluripotent mouse cells. In 2005, as a recipient of the Inserm Avenir programme, he formed a new group in the IGMM to study control of cell proliferation by CDKs in vertebrates, applying chemical genetics and proteomics, allied with the biochemical system of Xenopus egg extracts. Daniel Fisher and his colleagues have worked extensively on functional redundancy of kinases and phosphatases in the control of the cell cycle, demonstrating the universality of the quantitative model in vertebrate DNA replication and the pre-eminent role of protein phosphatases in the control of cell cycle dynamics. He has also uncovered roles for nuclear actin in DNA replication. While continuing fundamental work on CDK control of the cell cycle, he has been working on roles of the CDK substrate and cell proliferation antigen, Ki-67, demonstrating that it plays an important role in all steps of carcinogenesis. Finally, using a CDK inhibitor model, he has validated an underlying principle of Adaptive Therapy in cancer and defining spatial constraints of tumours as an important parameter underlying the effectiveness of Adaptive Therapy.