Congratulations to SCI member Laura Attardi, PhD, on receiving The National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award! The Award supports accomplished leaders in cancer research, who are providing significant contributions toward understanding cancer and developing applications that may lead to a breakthrough in biomedical, behavioral, or clinical cancer research.
Attardi’s research will provide crucial new insight into how to modulate p53 pathways in therapeutic strategies for cancer. The Tumor Protein (TP) 53 tumor suppressor gene is mutated in over half of all human cancers, but the mechanisms through which p53 suppresses cancer in vivo remain incompletely understood. The Attardi Lab strives to deconstruct the pathways through which p53 suppresses cancer to elucidate pathways dysregulated upon p53 loss that could ultimately be targeted therapeutically. As recent work has revealed a critical role for alternative splicing in cancer, The Attardi Lab hypothesizes that studying p53 pathways at the post-transcriptional level, such as through splicing and proteomics analyses, will yield novel insights into p53-mediated tumor suppression. Attardi and her team also study p53-driven differentiation programs involved in cancer suppression and how they relate to normal homeostatic programs.