Gary A. Piazza, Ph.D.
Dr. Gary Piazza serves as the Principal Investigator for the SRMLSC. As a pharmacologist with a background in cancer biology and drug discovery, Dr. Piazza has extensive experience managing multidisciplinary teams in academic and industry settings. Investigators interested in collaborating with the SRMLSC or who have questions about the MLSCN are encouraged to contact Dr. Piazza for more information.
Dr. Piazza has broad expertise in pharmacology, cell biology and biochemistry with specific research interests in cancer drug discovery and development. As the Program Director for the Southern Research Molecular Libraries Screening Center, Dr. Piazza is responsible for a multidisciplinary program, which is part of the NIH Molecular Libraries and Imaging Program. Dr. Piazza also conducts research in the field of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and cancer. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Pharmacology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, serves on the Editorial Board of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, and participates in a number of NIH grants review panels.
Dr. Piazza received a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from The University of Alabama at Birmingham. His dissertation research involved the study of the cytoskeleton and regulation by calmodulin. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, he was the first to isolate and characterize kinesin from tumor cells. At Brown University, as a Research Oncologist, Dr. Piazza uncovered a novel activity of dipeptidylpeptidase IV involving cell-extracellular matrix interactions. Dr. Piazza has held positions in the pharmaceutical industry as a Research Scientist with The Procter and Gamble Company in Cincinnati and as a Senior Director of Biology at Cell Pathways Inc. in Philadelphia where he led the preclinical development of two cancer drugs that were advanced to clinical trials. Dr. Piazza also served as the Director of Pharmacology at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center's Institute for Drug Development in San Antonio. With over 20 years of combined academic and pharmaceutical research experience, Dr. Piazza joined Southern Research in 2003.
The goal of the Southern Research Molecular Libraries Screening Center (SRMLSC) is to identify novel pharmacological probes to study cellular processes involved in health and disease. The SRMLSC utilizes high speed robotics to screen large chemical libraries in a diverse range of biochemical, molecular, and cell-based assays. As a multidisciplinary program, the group has broad expertise in biology and chemistry with specialized capabilities in assay development, automation, databases, synthetic chemistry, cheminformatics, computational chemistry, and cellular imaging. In addition to supporting the NIH Roadmap Initiative for Medical Research, these capabilities are offered to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry on a contractual basis.
Dr. Piazza's research is primarily focused on studying the mechanism responsible for the antineoplastic properties of NSAIDs to define cyclooxygenase-independent targets that can be exploited for drug discovery. In collaboration with medicinal chemists, a novel class of NSAID derivatives that lack cyclooxygenase inhibitory activity was identified, which display significantly greater potency to inhibit tumor cell growth. These activities along with good pharmaceutical properties are anticipated to yield new drugs that are safer and more efficacious than NSAIDs for cancer applications, including the treatment of malignant disease to reverse multi-drug resistance. A lead compound, SRI 21009, is currently being tested for in vivo anti-tumor efficacy and safety.
