Andrei Gartel, PhD

Andrei Gartel, PhD, is Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics in the Department of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at UIC.He joined UIC in 1991. He has extensive knowledge in molecular biology, cellular biology and in the identification of potential anticancer drugs. His major contribution to the field was a discovery that c-Myc negatively regulates transcription of the CDK inhibitor p21 via interaction with transcription factors Sp1/Sp3. In addition, his laboratory discovered the presence of alternate p21 transcripts that are strongly regulated by p53 in human and mouse cells. When his laboratory was looking for proapoptotic compounds that inhibit p21, they discovered nucleoside analog ARC that acts as a transcriptional inhibitor. They found positive auto-regulation loop of the oncogenic transcription factor FOXM1 and negative regulation of FOXM1 by tumor suppressor p53. Recently, his laboratory demonstrated that the thiazole antibiotics, thiostrepton and Siomycin A, but not other thiazole antibiotics, inhibit FOXM1 and act as proteasome inhibitors. Moreover, they found that well-known proteasome inhibitors, such as bortezomib, ixozamib, and MG132, also inhibit FOXM1 expression. His lab found before that in human cancer cells, nucleophosmin (NPM), interact with FOXM1 and their interaction is required for sustaining the level and localization of FOXM1. These data support the notion that targeting the interaction between nuclear FOXM1 and NPM by novel compounds that we identified will destabilize FOXM1 and suppress its expression and may represent in combination with current chemotherapy a novel therapeutic strategy against acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

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Gartel in Blood Cancer Journal

Acute myeloid leukemia is a disease with a grim prognosis – only a quarter of patients over the age of 20 survive to five years after diagnosis. But people with […]

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