Alexander Levitzki

Alexander Levitzki was born in 1940 in Jerusalem

Alexander Levitzki was born in Jerusalem in 1940 to Charlotte and Jacob Levitzki. His father received the Israel Prize for exact sciences in 1953. He went to the Hebrew University Secondary School.

He studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1968 he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. From 1968 to 1971 he did postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, with Daniel Koshland, studying negative cooperativity in enzymes.

In 1974 he became an associate professor at the Hebrew University and at the Weizmann Institute. In 1976 he became a full professor of biochemistry at the Hebrew University. He was a visiting professor at several institutions in the United States and headed the science section of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 2004 to 2007.

From 1985 he studied signaling by cancer proteins and developed tyrphostins, inhibitors of tyrosine kinases. In 1993 he showed that an inhibitor of the Bcr-Abl kinase kills chronic myeloid leukemia cells, work that led Novartis to develop Gleevec in 1996. He also worked on preventing the narrowing of blood vessels after angioplasty and on making cancer cells destroy themselves.