Robert Benezra

Dr. Benezra is a member at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer in the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics and a Professor of Biology at Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York City. Before he joined Sloan-Kettering, Dr. Benezra received his Ph.D. at Columbia University. and then did his postdoctoral work at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. It is there where Dr. Benezra identified the Id proteins as dominant negative regulators of the helix-loop-helix protein family and has since gone on to identify these proteins as key regulators of tumor growth, angiogenesis and metastasis. In addition, while at Sloan-Kettering, Dr. Benezra and his colleagues identified the first human mitotic checkpoint gene, hsMad2, and demonstrated that its deregulation leads to chromosome instability, tumor progression and drug resistance. His program continues to focus on the molecular basis of tumor angiogenesis, tumor instability and metastasis and is currently developing molecular and cellular tools to inhibit these processes in patients. In 1999, after genetic validation of the importance of Id proteins in cancer and vascular disease, Dr. Benezra co-founded Angiogenex, a company dedicated to targeting Id proteins therapeutically. Since then he has directed the effort that produced a series of active small molecules that target the Id proteins and have demonstrated profound potential in disease intervention.