Rate My Professor Dario Altieri

Dario C. Altieri, M.D., serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Wistar Institute, Director of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center, and Robert and Penny Fox Distinguished Professor in the Genome Regulation and Cell Signaling Program. Also holding the Wistar Institute Professorship in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine through affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania, he is a physician-scientist specializing in cancer biology. Born in Milan, Italy, Altieri earned a B.S. in Medicine and M.D. from the University of Milan School of Medicine in 1982 and 1985, respectively, along with postgraduate training in internal medicine and a specialty degree in clinical and experimental hematology. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in immunology at the Scripps Research Institute and received an M.A. from Yale University in 1999. His career trajectory includes research fellow and faculty roles at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation starting in 1987, associate professorship at Yale University School of Medicine's Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine in 1994, full professorship with tenure in 1999 and membership on the Yale Cancer Center executive committee, founding chair of the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2002, and directorship of the UMass Memorial Cancer Center. Altieri joined The Wistar Institute in 2010 as director of its National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center and first Chief Scientific Officer, ascending to President and CEO in 2015.

Altieri's research investigates mechanisms of cellular adaptation and plasticity in cancer, with a focus on mitochondrial functions in bioenergetics, reactive oxygen species buffering, inter-organelle communication, and retrograde signaling reprogrammed to support tumor proliferation, survival, invasion, and metastasis. His laboratory discovered and characterized survivin, a novel anti-apoptosis gene expressed in cancer and lymphoma (Ambrosini et al., Nature Medicine, 1997), and pursues mitochondrial proteostasis and novel therapeutics, including a drug advanced to Phase 1 clinical trials for prostate cancer. He has authored over 260 publications, holds 13 patents, and contributes editorially to eight journals including The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Key recent publications encompass Parkin-mediated innate immunity in antitumor responses (Perego et al., Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2024), Parkin ubiquitination suppressing metastasis (Yeon et al., Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2023), and ghost mitochondria driving metastasis (Ghosh et al., PNAS, 2022). Altieri co-founded the National Cancer Biology Training Consortium and Pancreatic Cancer Alliance in 2005, received the Outstanding Investigator Award in 2018, and was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 1997.