Anthony Cerami received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. in 1967 from Rockefeller University, New York, completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and at the Jackson Laboratory and served for 20 years as Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Medical Biochemistry, and Dean of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies at Rockefeller.

[8][9] As of March 1998, Cerami was President of Cerami Consulting and was president and Trustee of the "Kenneth S. Warren Laboratories, Inc.[10] The Picower Institute was closed down by Picower in 2001,[11] and early the next year it was acquired by The Institute for Medical Research at North Shore-LIJ.

[14] Cerami has led research programs into genetic, metabolic and infectious diseases, with the goal of translating scientific discovery into drugs and diagnostic tests.

He received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to study neglected tropical diseases and traveled to Africa, where he became interested in the wasting, one of the symptoms of African sleeping sickness.

[2] He developed and validated a measurement of glycated hemoglobin to monitor control of blood sugar in people with diabetes,[15] and a paper he published in 1985 using polyclonal antibodies against tumour necrosis factor-alpha was important in the field of immunology for demonstrating that TNF-alpha causes disease and blocking it could be a treatment.