Altieri is interested in how mechanisms of cellular adaptation or 鈥減lasticity鈥� are universally exploited in cancer for disease maintenance and progression. Multiple cellular pathways of response to stress, metabolic rewiring, and control of cell death are invariably subverted in human tumors, and often confer more aggressive disease traits including the ability to disseminate to distant organs, or metastasis. A detailed, molecular, cellular, and genetic understanding of tumor plasticity could uncover new therapeutic targets and identify novel approaches to interfere with metastatic competence, which remains the primary cause of death for cancer patients.  

Born in Milan, Italy, and educated at the University of Milan School of Medicine, Altieri is a physician-scientist trained in internal medicine and holds a postgraduate degree in clinical and experimental hematology. In 1987, he joined the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California, first as a research fellow and later as a member of the faculty. 

In 1994, Altieri became an associate professor at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, where he was named professor with tenure in 1999 and member of the Yale Cancer Center executive committee. In 2002, Altieri was recruited as the founding chair of the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Director of the UMass Memorial Cancer Center. Altieri joined the Institute as the Wistar Cancer Center Director and its first Chief Scientific Officer in September 2010. He was appointed as President and Chief Executive Officer of Wistar in 2015 while continuing to serve as Director of the recently renamed National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center.