Roberto Pili Lab at the University at Buffalo

Welcome to Our Lab

The Pili laboratory has been engaged in translational research in the field of genitourinary malignancies for the past 20 years. After Dr. Pili's clinical research training and establishing a kidney cancer research program at Johns Hopkins, he took the leadership of the Genitourinary Program at Roswell Park and then led the Experimental and Developmental Therapeutic Program at the Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center at Indiana University. He moved recently to the University at Buffalo to build a new cancer research program. Our laboratory and clinical research interests have focused on drug development for genitourinary malignancies. We have been studying the therapeutic role of histone deacetylase inhibitors in modulating tumor differentiation, angiogenesis and immune responses. We have developed and tested several rational combination strategies of HDAC inhibitors with VEGF and mTOR inhibitors in preclinical models and translated them into clinical trials for bladder, renal cell and prostate carcinoma patients. Moreover, we have shown the synergy between HDAC inhibition and immune therapies, and we are conducting clinical trials to test this hypothesis. More recently, we have been assessing the impact of dietary protein restriction on immunomodulation.