INTEGRATIVE BRAIN TUMOR PROGRAM

Dr. James Purzner is a neurosurgeon scientist at Queen's University who completed his neurosurgical residency in Toronto and his PhD at Stanford University.  Dr. Purzner has two major focuses.  First, he studies the intersection between early brain development and medulloblastoma, the most common pediatric brain cancer.  Rather than the typical approach of promoting cell death in cancer cells, we have been reverse engineering terminal neuronal differentiation pathways that normally occur during brain development, back into cancer cells thereby driving them to differentiate into benign neurons.  Differentiation therapy does not rely on apoptosis and is therefore effective in tumors that are resistant to current standard of care chemotherapy drugs.  In medulloblastoma, variants with apoptotic pathway mutations have near 100% mortality.  

His second focus is exploring how tumour cells interact with normal brain in glioblastomas, the most common malignant brain tumor of adulthood. By densely sampling the boundaries of the tumour and comparing the areas that led to recurrence to areas that did not recur using modern spatial genomics we will be able understand which combination of cells and neighbors are most dangerous for recurrence.  ​