Dr. Andrei Gartel is an Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics. He has extensive knowledge in molecular biology, cellular biology and in identification of potential anticancer drugs. Dr. Gartel is an academic editor of PLOS One and a reviewer for many different grant agencies, including National Institute of Health (NIH), Medical Research Council (United Kingdom) and the Welcome Trust (United Kingdom). Earlier, Dr. GartelGÇÖs 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, Dr. GartelGÇÖs 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 AML.
He has extensive knowledge in molecular biology, cellular biology and in identification of potential anticancer drugs.