About Us

At Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) we specialize in research aimed at finding cures for cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases by identifying their underlying molecular mechanisms. Join our team, discover the many Ways to Give today.

The Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) is a nonprofit charity 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.

SHRO researchers have completed research on new technologies designed to diagnose lung, ovarian, endometrial, breast and brain tumors as well as lymphomas. Their work with gene therapy has also led to new strategies to treat tumors of the lung and brain, and has led to over twenty patents.

SHRO relies on grants and private donations to fund important biomedical research.

SHRO is dedicated to supporting scientific research aimed at finding cures for cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases by identifying their underlying molecular mechanisms. SHRO includes the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine located at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA and an SHRO affiliated laboratory located at the University of Siena in Siena, Italy. Over 200 SHRO molecular biologists, geneticists, physicists, and chemists work to develop new methods to understand, diagnose and cure disease.

In 1993, Antonio Giordano, M.D., Ph.D., founded the Sbarro Health Research Organization Institute 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, and cell cycle genes CDK9, CDK10.

When Dr. 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.