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The Two Faces of p53: Tumor Suppressor and OncogeneHHS Only

Air date: Friday, June 17, 2016, 12:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
Description: NCI’s Center for Cancer Research (CCR) Grand Rounds

Dr. Carol Prives is the DaCosta Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She was educated in Canada, receiving her BSc and PhD from McGill University. After postdoctoral training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Weizmann Institute, she became a faculty member at the Weizmann in Israel after which she joined the Biological Sciences Department at Columbia University where she was appointed to a named professorship in 1995. Dr Prives served as Chair of that department between 2000 and 2004. Since the late 1980’s her work has focused on the p53 tumor suppressor protein, the product of the most frequently mutated gene in human cancers. She established conditions for purifying and characterizing the p53 protein biochemically and her group was among the first to show that p53 is a sequence specific transcriptional activator. She also found that tumor-derived mutant forms of p53, especially those that are mutated with high frequency, are defective in such transactivation. Her laboratory has continued to study p53 as a DNA binding transactivator, with special focus on mechanisms by which p53 selects its target genes. She and her colleagues also provided the first model for stabilization of p53 by genotoxic stress by showing that p53 becomes phosphorylated after DNA damage at sites that weaken its interaction with its negative regulator Mdm2. She has continued to study the structure and functional regulation of Mdm2 and its relationship to p53. After the p53 homologues, p63 and p73, were identified, she developed and tested the hypothesis that one of the modes by which some tumor derived mutant forms of p53 elicit pro-oncogenic activities is through down-regulation of the apoptotic functions of p63/p73. Since then her work has focused on many aspects of the p53 family and on mutant p53. Recently her laboratory examined mutant p53 pro-oncogenic activities in breast cancer cell lines using the “3D” culture protocol where she showed that mutant p53 proteins increase levels of the enzymes that regulate cholesterol biosynthesis and that statins effective reduce growth of breast cancer cells with mutant p53. Dr Prives has served as Chair of both the Experimental Virology and the Cell and Molecular Pathology Study Sections of the NIH and was a member of the NCI Intramural Scientific Advisory Board. She was also a member of the Advisory Boards of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Massachusetts General Cancer Center as well as the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr Prives has received numerous honors including being named an American Cancer Society Research Professor, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. She has received numerous awards and lectureships including the NCI Rosalind E Franklin Award for Women in Science and the AACR-Women in Cancer Research Charlotte Friend Memorial Lectureship Award. Most recently she was awarded an honorary doctorate from McGill University, her alma mater.
Author: Carol L. Prives, Ph.D., DaCosta Professor of Biology, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University
Runtime: 1 hour