Michael Gottesman - Biography#

Michael Gottesman was Deputy Director for Intramural Research at NIH from 1993=2022 and has been Chief, Laboratory of Cell Biology, Center for Cancer Research, NCI, NIH since 1990. He is an elected fellow of the AAAS, the American Association of Physicians, and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and has been an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine since 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008, and the National Academy of Sciences since 2018. His laboratory has been interested in defining molecular mechanisms of resistance to anti-cancer drugs and identified the human ATP-binding cassette (ABC) gene, ABCB1 or P-gp, that causes cancer cells to resist many anticancer drugs by pumping these drugs out of drug-resistant human cancers, but also contributes to pharmacokinetics of many drugs and to physiological barriers such as the blood-brain barrier. His lab was the first to clone this human ABC transporter, which is the first defined member of a family of 48 human ABC transporters involved in drug and nutrient absorption, distribution, and excretion. More recently his work has extended to defining other causes of resistance to anti-cancer drugs, such as cisplatin.