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
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 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
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Qingsong Liu.
- 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, in parallel with Stuart Schreiber's group and others. His lab then mapped much of the machinery around it, several parts in parallel with other labs: 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