Umut Şahin is an associate professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and faculty member in the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences at Sabanci University. With 25 years of experience in cellular and molecular biology, he made important contributions to understanding SUMOylation, a crucial and evolutionarily conserved biological process that becomes dysregulated in diseases such as cancer, neurodegeneration, and infection. His team adopts a multidisciplinary approach, integrating basic science with translational medicine to address complex challenges in cell biology, exploring SUMOylation’s potential for drug discovery, targeted therapies and genome engineering.

Umut Şahin earned his undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University and completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Carl Blobel, MD, PhD, in the Cell Biology Department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. During his PhD studies, he identified the proteases that act as the primary activators for all ligands of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a receptor critical for both development and cancer progression. This groundbreaking work has significant implications for understanding how EGFR signaling pathways operate and could pave the way for targeted therapies in cancer treatment. You can read this classic paper in the Journal of Cell Biology here.

During his post-doctoral training with Prof. Hugues de Thé, MD, PhD (College de France, Paris), he studied the interplay between the cellular SUMO system and PML nuclear bodies. These membraneless organelles are closely associated with acute promyelocytic leukemia, a rare and aggressive form of hematological cancer, and have emerged as nuclear hotspots of protein SUMOylation. You can access his seminal paper in the Journal of Cell Biology here and find another one in Nature Communications here. Additionally, during this period, in collaboration with Ali Bazarbachi, he demonstrated that the clinical efficacy of the arsenic/interferon combination, a targeted therapy for adult T-cell lymphoma—an aggressive, chemotherapy-resistant malignancy—depends on PML-mediated hyper-SUMOylation and the subsequent degradation of Tax, the oncogenic protein driving this cancer.

His contributions were recognized with awards from EMBO (Installation Grant), TÜBİTAK (2247A-National Leader Researchers Program) and the Science Academy Turkey (BAGEP).

Before joining Sabanci University, he served as a faculty member at Boğaziçi University for eight years. You can read a recent interview with him at Life Science Alliance.