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The Wistar Institute president receives NCI award
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Dario C. Altieri, MD, president and CEO of The Wistar Institute, received an Outstanding Investigator Award from NCI.
The award recognizes highly accomplished scientists whose research is transforming the field and has a far-reaching impact on cancer research.
“It is an honor to receive this prestigious grant that will impact my research efforts over the next several years by offering the freedom to take on innovative projects and break new ground in line with the current trajectory of my research,” Altieri, director of The Wistar Institute’s cancer center, said in a press release. “Because of investments into understanding cancer genes and their pathways, many scientific milestones have come to fruition in the last half century, but the long-term success of virtually any type of cancer therapy is still hampered by the onset of drug resistance and disease dissemination.”
The grant, which totals nearly $8 million over 7 years, will fund Altieri’s research into how tumor plasticity — the ability of tumor cells to adapt to stressful conditions in the surrounding microenvironment — causes or accelerates the acquisition of new traits, such as drug resistance and the ability to metastasize.
“This grant will advance our understanding of how the enormous adaptability of tumor cells reprograms key cellular functions in metabolism, survival and proliferation to confer more aggressive disease traits,” Altieri said. “Ultimately, the expectation is that the new knowledge will help us exploit new, unprecedented vulnerabilities in this process of cellular adaptation for innovative drug discovery efforts to benefit patients with late-stage disease.”
Altieri is the first Wistar scientist to receive an Outstanding Investigator Award.