Richard Hynes, a biologist and cancer researcher who helped uncover the way that cells adhere to and interact with one another, has passed away at the age of 81.
Hynes grew up in Liverpool in the UK. His parents had scientific backgrounds; he and his three siblings all became scientists. After attending high school in Liverpool, Hynes studied biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. In his 20s, Hynes came to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he eventually joined the faculty and established a laboratory.
Early in his career, Hynes wondered how cancer cells differ from normal cells. He found a protein that binds to the surface of normal cells but was missing in cancer cells. Something seemed to connect this protein, named fibronectin, to activities inside of cells, so scientists began looking for a potential receptor.
A cellular receptor for fibronectin was eventually identified, a receptor that lay across the cellular membrane that Hynes named integrin. Eventually, Hynes and colleagues showed that seemingly different receptors were actually structurally related: each was composed of two proteins that spanned the cell membrane connecting the extracellular matrix, or other cells, to the internal molecular skeleton. From here, research took off, and scientists eventually identified two dozen integrins in mammals. These receptors are highly conserved in animals and are proposed to have allowed multicellular life to develop.
Hynes continued to explore the role of cell adhesion in cancer metastasis, and in 2022 he was honored, along with Erkki Ruoslahti and Timothy Springer, with a Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.
