David Sabatini

David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2008 to 2021 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. He is known for his contributions to cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the co-discovery of mTOR.

In 2021 and 2022, Sabatini was fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and resigned from his positions at the Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology following allegations of sexual harassment. Sabatini denies the allegations.

David M. Sabatini was born and raised in New York to David D. Sabatini and Zulema Sabatini, both Argentine immigrants from Buenos Aires. He obtained his B.S. from Brown University, followed by his M.D. and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he worked in the lab of Solomon H. Snyder. He joined the Whitehead Institute as a Whitehead Fellow in 1997, the same year he enrolled at Johns Hopkins. In 2002 he became an Assistant Professor at MIT and a Member of the Whitehead Institute. He was promoted to tenured professor in 2006.

Sabatini currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is an avid biker and gardener. His father, David D. Sabatini, is a cell biologist and Professor at New York University. His younger brother, Bernardo L. Sabatini, is a neuroscientist and Professor at Harvard Medical School. Sabatini is the scientific founder of Navitor, Raze Therapeutics, and KSQ Therapeutics.

As a graduate student in Solomon Snyder's Lab at Johns Hopkins, Sabatini began working on understanding the molecular mechanism of rapamycin; a macrolide antibiotic discovered in the soil of Easter Island that has potent antifungal, immunosuppressive and anti-tumorigenic properties. Although the TOR/DRR genes had been identified in 1993 as conferring rapamycin resistance in budding yeast, the direct target of rapamycin and its mechanism of action in mammals was unknown.

In 1994, Sabatini used rapamycin and its binding partner FKBP12 to purify the mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) protein from rat brain, showing it to be the direct target of rapamycin in mammals and the homolog of the yeast TOR/DRR genes.

Since starting his lab at the Whitehead Institute in 1997, Sabatini has made numerous critical contributions to understanding mTOR function, regulation, and importance in diseases such as cancer. For example, his lab discovered the mTORC1 and mTORC2 multi-protein complexes, the nutrient-sensing Rag GTPase pathway upstream of mTORC1, and the direct amino acid sensors Sestrin and CASTOR.

Sabatini's research interests have expanded in recent years to include cancer metabolism and technology development surrounding the use of high-throughput genetic screens in human cells, most notably through RNA interference and the CRISPR-Cas9 system.