麻豆传媒

Altieri is interested in how mechanisms of cellular adaptation or 鈥減lasticity鈥� are universally exploited in cancer for disease maintenance and progression. Multiple cellular pathways of response to stress, metabolic rewiring, and control of cell death are invariably subverted in human tumors, and often confer more aggressive disease traits including the ability to disseminate to distant organs, or metastasis. A detailed, molecular, cellular, and genetic understanding of tumor plasticity could uncover new therapeutic targets and identify novel approaches to interfere with metastatic competence, which remains the primary cause of death for cancer patients.  

Born in Milan, Italy, and educated at the University of Milan School of Medicine, Altieri is a physician-scientist trained in internal medicine and holds a postgraduate degree in clinical and experimental hematology. In 1987, he joined the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California, first as a research fellow and later as a member of the faculty. 

In 1994, Altieri became an associate professor at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, where he was named professor with tenure in 1999 and member of the Yale Cancer Center executive committee. In 2002, Altieri was recruited as the founding chair of the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Director of the UMass Memorial Cancer Center. Altieri joined the Institute as the Wistar Cancer Center Director and its first Chief Scientific Officer in September 2010. He was appointed as President and Chief Executive Officer of Wistar in 2015 while continuing to serve as Director of the recently renamed National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center. 

Murphy studies the genetics of the p53 tumor suppressor protein. Her laboratory focuses on genetic variants of p53 that exist in populations of African-descent (P47S and Y107H) and Ashkenazi Jewish descent (G334R). Her work seeks to understand the impact of these genetic variants of p53 on cancer risk and the efficacy of cancer therapy. She also seeks to identify personalized medicine approaches for tumors with these variants. Therefore, her work has direct relevance for improving the cancer prognosis and therapy of African and Ashkenazi Jewish Americans. Murphy also studies the cancer-survival protein HSP70. Her lab employs a novel series of HSP70 inhibitors for melanoma and colorectal cancer therapy.

Murphy obtained a B.S. degree in biochemistry at Rutgers University, followed by a doctorate in molecular biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. In 1994, she began postdoctoral research at Princeton University in the laboratory of Arnold J. Levine, Ph.D., the co-discoverer of p53. In 1998, Murphy became an Assistant Professor at Fox Chase Cancer Center, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003, and Full Professor in 2011. She joined The Wistar Institute in 2011 and became Program Leader of the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program in 2012. Murphy is an adjunct professor at Drexel University College of Medicine and The Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Oncologist Patricia LoRusso, DO, associate director of innovative medicine at Yale Medicine, has expertise in testing new treatments on patient volunteers who have advanced stages of cancer. Her passion is bringing research breakthroughs into the clinic to help patients with different types and stages of cancer.
The clinical trials at Yale Cancer Center offer access to experimental drugs that are sometimes a patient’s last and best hope, says Dr. LoRusso. Therapies that prove successful can advance through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval process. “Many of the drugs tested here will help generations of cancer patients,” says Dr. LoRusso. In her career, 14 cancer drugs she has performed clinical trials on, which she refers to as her “children,” have gone on to gain FDA approval.
Dr. LoRusso leads the Phase I clinical trials infusion center at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven. She infuses the center with a warm, team-focused approach that puts patients at the center of care. “We’re improving patients’ lives in Connecticut and beyond,” says Dr. LoRusso.

Daniel King, MD, PhD, is a former Howard Hughes research scholar at the National Institutes of Health and trained in genomics and bioinformatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he developed software tools to perform mosaic copy number detection. During his time at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, he spearheaded copy number analysis for 36,000 exome samples in the Deciphering Developmental Disorder Rare Disease project. The results from this work characterized unprecedented detail in the landscape and architecture of developmental disorders, was published in Nature and Lancet, and led to several first author publications.
Following medical and graduate school, Dr. King pursued a medical oncology fellowship under the ABIM Research Track pathway at Stanford University. A core focus of his fellowship research involved circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), which included the computational design of a ctDNA detection panel for pancreas cancer and laboratory validation. This work extended to fragmentomics—a computational analysis of circulating DNA fragment ends as a biomarker of cancer for early detection. From here, Dr. King created a large biobank of pancreas cancer specimens consisting of nearly 500 clinical blood samples from approximately 250 patients. He went on to link this biobank with a large clinical research database built in pancreatic cancer to mine and associate clinical data with translational correlates.