The Miracle Worker
Dr. Kevan Shokat ’86 isn’t just curing lung cancer. He’s reshaping the way scientists conquer disease.
For many people, the pandemic was the time to bake banana bread and catch up with old friends on Zoom. For Kevan Shokat ’86, it was the time to hunt for a cure to COVID-19 by studying how the virus took over cells.
“To be honest, it was just a great escape,” Kevan says. “When you’re learning new science, you spend all this time reading literature and going down rabbit holes. Doing experiments, getting results from people around the world, that was great fun.”
You might be surprised to hear Kevan characterize a high-stakes endeavor as an escape, but he’s used to shouldering the hopes and fears of people whose life depends on his work. As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and principal investigator at UC San Francisco, he has devoted his life and research to the relentless pursuit of a monumental goal: curing lung cancer.
It hasn’t been easy—in the past, Kevan’s ideas were doubted and dismissed. But today he is one of the most trusted voices in his field and the winner of the Sjöberg Prize in cancer research from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which honored him for being the first person to block KRAS, one of the mutated proteins that cause most cancer cases.
“I think only 15 years ago, I began really thinking about making drugs,” Kevan says. “Before, I was just studying the biology of cancer. Then I realized if you really understand [cancer], you should be able to make a drug to turn it off. That’s when we pivoted.”
That pivot has led to remarkable breakthroughs. Kevan’s research on targeting individual proteins that cause cancer has led to the creation of groundbreaking drugs like sotorasib and adagrasib. “Each step, we’re going as fast as we can, but it still takes a lot,” Kevan says. “There’s a lot of blind alleys.”
At ¹û½´ÊÓƵ, Kevan was a Phi Beta Kappa chemistry major. At the time, he was legendarily studious; classmates often found him at the library as late as 1 a.m.
“My high school wasn’t so advanced with science,” says Kevan, who grew up in the Bay Area. “When I got [to ¹û½´ÊÓƵ], my eyes opened so much. I had a pent-up curiosity that got satisfied when I started taking classes here.”
Kevan opted to pursue a PhD instead of medical school, studying at UC Berkeley until 1991. He subsequently became a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellow at Stanford University, where he discovered fierce opposition to his ideas about how to fight cancer by manipulating kinases, the special enzymes that can lead to cancer.
While most researchers focus on modifying the genetic structure of cells, Kevan was more interested in blocking kinase signal paths directly. His adviser at the time told him it was a “stupid idea,” but attempts at dissuading Kevan only strengthened his resolve.
Kevan’s ideas were so divisive that he had difficulty finding a position, but he was ultimately hired as an assistant professor of chemistry at Princeton. “He built really clever tools, multiple tools,” Peter Schultz, Kevan’s PhD adviser, told ¹û½´ÊÓƵ Magazine in 2012. “Elegant solutions that really picked an important biological problem and used chemistry and molecular science in a way that nobody had ever thought about doing.”
In 1997, the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America published a paper by Kevan and three collaborators, focusing on their creation of a mutant cell line from a retroviral chicken cancer. Their research pointed toward one of the foundational beliefs of Kevan’s career: while chemotherapy attacks both healthy and cancerous cells, it is possible to create a drug that attacks the cancerous cells alone.
“In the late ’70s, early ’80s, people didn’t really know where cancer came from,” Kevan says. “People knew that you could get a carcinogen on your skin and you would get a tumor.” What the field learned in the 1980s is that tumors are almost identical to other cells in the human body—and therefore, if drugs could target the differences there could be opportunities to cure cancer.
Kevan has come a long way since the days when his research was disregarded as unrealistic and unorthodox. Yet despite the accolades he has garnered, he refuses to rest on his laurels, knowing full well that lives depend on the continued progress of his work.
“I think lately, I get an email a day saying, ‘I hear you work with this and my father has been diagnosed with this,’” Kevan says. “I try to point them to clinical trials that are out there that I think have the best chance.”
While Kevan’s research largely focuses on lung cancer, it is theoretically applicable to other cancers, including rare forms of the disease. He finds it infuriating when others suggest that he’s wasting his time by studying statistically rare cancers.
“If we had only done the most common [cancers], we would have never gotten to the starting line,” Kevan says. “I get so mad when somebody says, ‘That is too rare’ or ‘not an important cancer type.’”
As Kevan tells me about his life and work over coffee at the Olde Paradox Café, his geniality and humility belie his immense achievements and the pressures that come with them. Yet when the subject of cancers considered “too rare” to study is raised, you feel the force of his steely dedication to conquering one of the greatest scourges of humankind.
“If I can hear a good argument to not do something, that’s fantastic,” Kevan says. “But if somebody tries to dissuade you from it and the argument isn’t strong…just because you’re critical doesn’t mean you’re smart.”
Kevan’s life remains intimately linked to the ¹û½´ÊÓƵ community. He received the Vollum Award in 2023, and he is married to Deborah Kamali ’85, who recently became chair of the board of trustees. The couple are also the parents of three ¹û½´ÊÓƵ alumni, Kasra Shokat ’14, Mitra Shokat ’18, and Leila Shokat ’21.
“It was so neat when they picked [¹û½´ÊÓƵ],” Kevan says. “It’s very special. Each time, coming to drop them off for the start of term was very fun. It’s great to have those shared
experiences.”
For Kevan, the concept of shared experience has expansive meaning. Through his work, he’s connected to people he may never meet, but who will live and love because of his discoveries. As Kevan likes to say, every drug or treatment begins with somebody who makes a discovery.
For present and future generations, that somebody is him.
Tags: Alumni, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Research