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Research Overview

Despite the rarity of childhood cancers, they are the leading cause of death from disease among children in the United States. A central challenge to improving long-term survival in pediatric cancer patients is an extremely limited spectrum of therapeutics that are effective in the setting of recurrent or metastatic tumors. High-throughput genomic studies have underscored the scarcity of mutations in pediatric tumors and also highlighted the need to evaluate changes in chromatin structure, post-translational modifications on proteins and a dysfunctional tumor microenvironment as drivers of childhood cancers. The advantage to the study of epigenetic, proteomic or immune mis-regulation in cancers is that these are potentially reversible and can be therapeutically targeted. Indeed, a number of epigenetic, kinase and immune modulators are in clinical trials for adult cancers and can be readily leveraged in a pediatric setting. Thus, the overall goal of research in my lab is to understand how pediatric brain tumors develop and to translate this information for therapeutic purposes.

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