On January 17th 2011, Dr. Mitsu Ikura received the 2010 Canadian Cancer Society "Robert L. Noble Prize" for his outstanding contributions to cancer research in Canada.
From the citation (http://www.cancer.ca): "Dr. Ikura is an internationally recognized authority in the field of structural biology and has laid the groundwork for our understanding of signalling proteins such as cadherins and catenins and molecular signalling processes involved in human diseases such as cancer. His studies also provide excellent platforms for developing new drugs designed to interfere with the functioning of cancer cells.
Dr Ikura is a senior scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute and a professor at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in macromolecular biophysics from Hokkaido University, Japan and pursued postdoctoral studies on multi-dimensional NMR spectroscopy of a calmodulin-kinase peptide complex at the National Institutes of Health.
Dr Ikura has a Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in cancer structural biology and has been recognized by many awards and prizes including the William E. Rawls Prize, the International Research Scholar Award Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Premier’s Research Excellence Award.
He has published over 190 peer-reviewed papers and has been invited to speak at more than 200 international scientific conferences."
About "Robert L Noble" Prize: The Robert L. Noble Prize is given for outstanding achievements in cancer research. It honours Dr Noble, an esteemed Canadian investigator whose research in the 1950s led to the discovery of vincristine, a widely-used anti-cancer drug. At the time, vincristine was one of the most effective treatments available for Hodgkin’s disease.
Web: the Ikura Laboratory http://nmr.uhnres.utoronto.ca/ikura/index.html