The Two Faces of p53: Tumor Suppressor and Oncogene

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...
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