Goutham, Narla, MD, PhD

My research interests focus on understanding the mechanisms driving human cancer development and progression and has led to: 1) the identification of a new class of tumor suppressor genes in human cancer (the Kruppel-like factor family of genes), 2) the characterization of novel mechanisms of tumor suppressor gene inactivation in cancer progression (alternative splicing into dominant negative oncogenic splice variants), 3) the development and validation of pharmaceutically tractable strategies to reactive tumor suppressor gene function for the treatment of a broad range of human cancers, and 4) the structural, functional and biological mechanisms of PP2A inactivation in human cancer. These studies span the continuum of biomedical research starting from fundamental mechanism-driven laboratory-based studies directed at identifying novel cancer genes to the translation of these findings into the development of new drugs for cancer treatment. These novel small-molecule tumor suppressor gene activators represent the first, to our knowledge, example of drugs that directly bind and activate tumor suppressor genes for cancer treatment and provide the mechanistic and translational framework/foundation to develop entire classes of drugs directed at the key negative regulators of oncogenic signaling, an area that to date has not been the focus of major drug development efforts.