Professor David Vaux

David Vaux opened the molecular era of cell death research by identifying the first component of the mechanism cells use to kill themselves, showing that failure of cell death leads to the development of cancer, and demonstrating that the cell death mechanism is evolutionarily conserved. He helped identify and characterise two families of cell death inhibitors, which underpinned the development of new classes of cancer therapies that work by activating the cell death machinery in cancer cells.