Email Address:
AGoldstein@mednet.ucla.edu
Office Phone Number:
310-206-1402
Office Address:
3141 Terasaki Life Sciences Building
610 Charles E Young Dr East
Los Angeles, CA 90095
| Affiliations |
| Assistant Professor, Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, Urology |
| Faculty, Cell & Developmental Biology GPB Home Area |
| Member, I3T Theme |
Dr. Goldstein is an Associate Professor in the departments of Molecular, Cell & Developmental Biology and Urology, and a member of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA. Dr. Goldstein attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire where he majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and was a two-time NCAA Division 1 All-American lacrosse player. Dr. Goldstein moved to UCLA where he completed his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr. Owen Witte, isolating epithelial progenitor cells from mouse and human prostate tissue and demonstrating the capacity of progenitor cells to respond to oncogenic transformation. This work included the first demonstration of a cell of origin for human prostate cancer reported in Science Magazine. In 2011, Dr. Goldstein became the Inaugural fellow of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center and received a Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award and a Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Research Program Idea Development Award to elucidate the cellular and molecular mechanisms promoting epithelial cancer initiation, progression and resistance to treatment.
His laboratory is interested in functionally defining mechanisms that drive the initiation and progression of human prostate cancer. Recent advances in sequencing technology have enabled the identification of numerous mutations, amplifications and deletions that may contribute to the pathogenesis of prostate cancer. However, few of these alterations have been functionally characterized to distinguish drivers from passengers. Dr. Goldstein’s group utilizes an innovative approach to engineer over-expression of known and candidate oncogenic drivers and determine which alterations can directly convert benign human prostate epithelium into cancer in mice. His group discovered that luminal progenitor cells are expanded in the aging mouse and human prostate, providing a potential explanation for the age-related increased risk of disease in the prostate. In addition to support from the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Department of Defense and American Cancer Society, Dr. Goldstein is funded by an NIH/NCI R01 award.