Oliver's mTOR Atlas Evidence Platform
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Qingsong Liu

Medicinal chemist in Nathanael Gray's lab who helped discover Torin1, an ATP-competitive mTOR inhibitor, and later built an independent kinase-inhibitor drug-discovery program in China

PI, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences – formerly Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Harvard Medical School (Gray lab)

Qingsong Liu Lab, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Hefei, China) ↗

In 2009, Qingsong Liu was a medicinal chemist in Nathanael Gray's lab (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Harvard Medical School) and co-authored the Thoreen et al. paper reporting Torin1 — one of the first highly potent, selective ATP-competitive mTOR inhibitors. The result reshaped the field: rapamycin only partially suppresses mTORC1, whereas directly blocking the kinase's ATP site with Torin1 hits those 'rapamycin-resistant' functions too — motivating a whole generation of second-generation mTOR kinase inhibitors.

Liu went on to lead his own kinase-inhibitor medicinal chemistry program at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developing the 'CHMFL' series of inhibitors against FLT3, BCR-ABL, EGFR, c-KIT, RIPK1 and other kinases for leukemia, GIST and inflammatory disease. The institutional trail (Harvard/Dana-Farber → Hefei CAS) and unbroken focus on ATP-competitive kinase inhibitor chemistry make this identification highly likely, though not formally confirmed in a single source.

Milestones in the Atlas

A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.

YearEvidenceStudy
2009 M An ATP-competitive mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor reveals rapamycin-resistant functions of mTORC1 THO2009 As a chemist in Nathanael Gray's lab, contributed to the discovery and characterization of Torin1, one of the first potent ATP-competitive mTOR inhibitors, establishing that direct mTOR kinase inhibition blocks rapamycin-resistant functions of mTORC1.

Co-authors in the Atlas 4

People with a profile here who share at least one study with Qingsong Liu.

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  • Carson C. Thoreen Used Torin1, one of the first ATP-competitive mTOR inhibitors, to reveal functions of mTORC1 that rapamycin cannot block. He then showed that mTORC1 controls translation of mRNAs for the protein-making machinery mainly through the 4E-BP proteins
  • David M. Sabatini Identified mTOR (as RAFT1) in 1994. His lab then mapped much of the machinery around it: raptor and rictor at the core of mTORC1 and mTORC2, the Rag–Ragulator system that docks mTORC1 on the lysosome, and the sensors that detect leucine, arginine and SAM
  • Nathanael S. Gray Medicinal chemist whose lab designed Torin1, an ATP-competitive mTOR inhibitor that blocks functions of mTORC1 that rapamycin misses. His lab is also known for covalent kinase inhibitors and targeted protein degraders
  • Seong A. Kang Contributed to the Sabatini-lab studies that identified PRAS40 and DEPTOR, two of the cell's own mTOR inhibitors, and to the first characterisation of the mTOR inhibitor Torin1

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