Profile of Ira Mellman

Nestled in an industrial sprawl at the foot of California’s San Bruno Mountain, the biotechnology firm Genentech faces the steel-gray waters of the San Francisco Bay. From his perch in the postcard-worthy campus, National Academy of Sciences member Ira Mellman has presided over a small cadre of cancer biologists for nearly half a decade. When Mellman became vice president of research oncology at the firm in 2007, he was already a household name among the world’s leading cell biologists thanks to his discovery of microscopic vesicles called endosomes, which shuttle proteins between compartments within cells. Over the years, he has become something of a scientific decathlete, adding entire dimensions to our understanding of the sorting of proteins in cells, the workings of the immune system, and the drivers of cancer. Since his appointment at Genentech, Mellman has helped usher a handful of cancer drugs into clinical trials, including antibodies against proteins implicated in a range of cancers. Ira Mellman. The South San Francisco campus of Genentech. A native New Yorker, Mellman moved to the American Midwest to study music at Oberlin College in Ohio. His father, a sometime teacher at Yale University, had long urged him to turn his gift for playing musical instruments into a lifelong pursuit, convinced that a musical career held more allure than one in chemistry. But an undergraduate biology laboratory course marked a turning point in his career, steering him away from music. Four decades later, he recalls the decision to pursue science with vindicated hindsight. “The more time I spent doing research, the more I became interested. Science was a promising choice, and has proven to be a fulfilling one,” he says. Mellman’s foray into biology began through an acquaintance with Oberlin professor and plant biochemist David Miller, who had been trying to deconstruct …