Epidermal growth factor receptor
Downward was educated at Eton College and earned a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences from Clare College, Cambridge. His PhD was supervised by Michael Waterfield at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund where he investigated Epidermal growth factor receptor, establishing in 1984 the close similarity between this cellular growth regulatory protein and the avian retroviral oncogene, v-erbB. This work led to the identification of the closely related cellular oncogene ErbB2/HER2, which is over-expressed in a major subset of breast cancers and is the target of the important targeted therapy, trastuzumab. From 1986 to 1989, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Robert Weinberg, at the Whitehead Institute for biomedical research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.