Zambetti, Gerard P.

Dr. Gerard Zambetti began working on p53 as a Damon-Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Arnie Levine at Princeton University in 1990. During  his fellowship  he developed the first mammalian promoter-reporter assay to monitor p53 transcriptional activity. A close colleague in the lab, Jamil Momand, identified Mdm2 as a 90 kD protein that binds wild-type p53. At the same time Donna George at Penn reported that Mdm2 promotes tumor growth.  They rationalized that Mdm2 could be oncogenic by binding and inactivating p53. This hypothesis was borne out by Dr. Zambetti's dem...