President & Founder, Sbarro Health Research Organization
Temple University, College of Science and Technology
Dr. Antonio Giordano is the President, Founder and Chairman of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO), Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO), a nonprofit organization committed to funding excellence in basic genetic research to cure and diagnose cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, and to foster the training of young doctors in a spirit of professionalism and humanism. Dr. Giordano founded the Sbarro Institute in 1993 with a generous donation from Mario Sbarro, the Founder of the Sbarro restaurant chain, following Dr. Giordano’s discovery of the tumor suppressor gene pRb2. Initially named the Sbarro Institute, the research center was located at Thomas Jefferson University, where Dr. Antonio Giordano was a professor.
When Dr. Antonio Giordano moved to Temple University in 2002, he and twenty fellow scientists forged a new, three-year alliance with Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Under the new arrangement, the original Sbarro Institute was renamed the Sbarro Health Research Organization, Inc. (SHRO), which includes the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine at Temple and the SHRO-affiliated laboratory at the University of Siena in Siena, Italy.
Under a 2005 agreement, the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine received continued funding from Temple and expanded its program to include work on the relationship between obesity and cancer and instituted a new program on molecular therapeutics to explore how molecular genetic research can be applied to patient therapies and diagnostics. Today, over 200 SHRO molecular biologists, geneticists, physicists, and chemists work to develop new methods to understand, diagnose and cure disease. SHRO relies on grants and private donations to fund important biomedical research.
Dr. GIordano is a Professor of Molecular Biology at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the Founder and Director of the SHRO-supported Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, as well as the Center for Biotechnology, which are both located in Temple University’s College of Science and Technology. Dr. Giordano is also a ‘Chiara fama’ professor of pathology in the Department of Medicine, Surgery, and Neuroscience at the University of Siena, Italy where the Temple Summer in Siena Biomedical Research program is based.
Born in Naples, Dr. Giordano, earned his medical degree at the University of Naples in 1986, and his doctorate at the University of Trieste in 1990. In his research over the years, Dr. Antonio Giordano identified a tumor suppressor gene, Rb2/p130, that has been found to be active in the lung, endometrial, brain, breast, liver, and ovarian cancers. Dr. Antonio Giordano also found that if doses of gamma radiation are combined with this gene, it accelerates the death of tumor cells. He went on to discover Cyclin A, Cdk9, and Cdk10. Cdk9 is known to play critical roles in HIV transcriptions, the inception of tumors, and cell differentiation. They also play a part in muscle differentiation and have been linked to various genetic muscular disorders.
Dr. Antonio Giordano has developed patented technologies for diagnosing cancer and has published over 600 papers on gene therapy, cell cycle, genetics of cancer, and epidemiology. He is the recipient of the Irving J. Selikoff Award for Cancer Research, the Rotary International Award, and Lions Club Napoli-Europa. He has also received the title of Knight of the Republic and Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. At the 25th anniversary of the National Organization of Italian American Women, he was awarded the Cross of Merit Melitense, an honor of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.