Craig Crews awarded the Havinga Medal 2025
Professor Craig M. Crews of Yale University (USA) is the recipient of the 2025 Havinga Medal.
Craig Crews studied chemistry at the University of Virginia, followed by doctoral and postdoctoral studies at Harvard University, working at the interface of organic chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Crews joined Yale University in 1995, where he became one of the founders of targeted protein degradation and the co-inventor of PROTACs: proteolysis-targeting chimeras. Crews proposed a radically new idea in medicine: instead of designing a molecule to inhibit a protein’s function, why not create one that marks it for destruction? In this concept, a small molecule acts as a bridge between the target protein and an E3 ubiquitin ligase, tagging it for the proteasome so that the cell itself would remove the protein. As such, a whole new class of proteins could be removed that would otherwise be ‘undruggable’. In 2001, his lab published the first proof of concept, followed by many years of refining the chemistry, the linkers, and the ligase recruiter molecules.
Today, more than two decades later, PROTACs are not only a thriving research field in many academic laboratories (including many in Leiden) but also a clinical reality. Several PROTAC-based drugs are now in advanced clinical trials, targeting proteins long thought to be “undruggable.”
Crews’ achievements have been recognized internationally: he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Association for Cancer Research, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. His work has earned him an impressive list of honors — from the Wieland Prize, the Scheele Award, and the AACR Outstanding Achievement award, to the IUPAC–Richter Prize. He is also the founder of several start-up companies, among which Arvinas and Halda Therapeutics.