Scientific Advisory Board

The research strategy for A Children's Brain Tumor Cure Foundation (formerly the PLGA Foundation) is guided by an External Scientific Advisory Committee and two Internal Scientific Advisors.

EXTERNAL SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Dr. Alexander W. Wood, Senior Consultant Pharmaceutical/Biotechnology Industry

Alexander Wood holds a bachelors of science degree in chemistry from Bates College, and a Ph.D., with honors, in the basic medical sciences from New York University School of Medicine. Following post-doctoral work in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, he began a 25-year career at Hoffmann- La Roche Inc., where he held various positions of increasing responsibility culminating in Director of the Department of Oncology. Dr. Wood joined Novartis Pharmaceuticals in 1998 as an Executive Director in Oncology, a position he held until his retirement in 2009. Since then he has been a senior lecturer in the Department of Biological Engineering at M.I.T. Dr. Wood has over 150 peer-reviewed full-length publications, primarily on the causes, prevention and target-based treatment of cancer. He served as an Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology at New York University School of Medicine for 25 years and an associate editor of Cancer Research and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. In addition to his responsibilities at M.I.T., he consults for the pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry and serves on the scientific advisory board of a brain tumor foundation.

Dr. Ingo Mellinghoff, Director Hematology/Oncology Research Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Mellinghoff is a Physician-Scientist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He completed his clinical (Hematology-Oncology) and laboratory research (Molecular Biology) training at the University of California, Los Angeles. He currently holds joint faculty appointments in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program and the Department of Neurology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and in the Department of Pharmacology at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, New York. His research focuses on the study of aberrant signaling transduction pathways in primary human brain tumors and the development of novel approaches to identify genomic and proteomic alterations in primary human tumors. Dr. Mellinghoff is experienced in the preclinical and clinical evaluation of novel therapeutic and imaging agents for cancer. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLoS Medicine, and others. He has received numerous awards for his work on brain cancer, including the Advanced Clinical Research Award in Glioma from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Sontag Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award, the Leon Levy Research Professor Award, and Physician Scientist awards from the Sidney Kimmel Foundation and Doris Duke Foundation.

Dr. Neal Rosen, MD, PhD, Enid Haupt Chair in Medical Oncology and a Member of the Program in Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Professor of Pharmacology, Cell Biology and Medicine at the Cornell University Medical School.

Dr. Rosen received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Columbia College and an MD, PhD in Molecular Biology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and post-doctoral training and a fellowship in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute. He was on the senior staff of the Medicine Branch at the NCI prior to joining the faculty of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Rosen's major interests are the identification and study of the key molecular events and growth signaling pathways responsible for the development of prostate, breast, melanoma and other human cancers, and the use of this information for the development of mechanism-based therapeutic strategies. In the course of this work his laboratory has developed inhibitors of the Hsp90 protein chaperone and validated their anticancer activity in animal models and clinical trials.Currently his laboratory work focuses on using pharmacologic and genetic approaches to develop a detailed understanding of feedback and cross-talk among oncogene-activated pathways in order to develop rational strategies for combination therapy.

Dr. Fiona Deutsch, Ph.D., Columbia University, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Neurology and Neuroscience, Developmental Neurobiologist

INTERNAL SCIENTIFIC ADVISORS 

Dr. Charles Stiles, Ph.D. Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Co-Chair, Department of Cancer Biology, DFCI Co-Director, Program in Pediatric Low-Grade Astrocytoma, DFCI

Dr. Stiles is well known for his work on signaling mechanisms that regulate growth and differentiation of stem cells in the developing brain. These signaling mechanisms, when perturbed, give rise to low-grade astrocytomas (LGAs) in children. However, these same signaling mechanisms lend themselves to the design of targeted therapeutics (a.k.a. “smart drugs”) that will kill tumor cells without the debilitating side effects seen with the current generation of cytotoxic drugs used to treat LGAs in children. Towards the goal of targeted therapeutics for pediatric LGAs, Stiles and his students work collaboratively with a wide range of scientists at Childrens Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard/MIT Broad Institute. They also work closely with scientists in the corporate sector who are developing targeted therapeutics for cancer therapy. Dr Stiles has published more than 100 research articles on cell signaling mechanisms in peer-reviewed journals and has also received prizes for both teaching and mentoring at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Mark Kieran, MD, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Associate Professor, Pediatrics, Children's Hospital Boston, Director of Pediatric Medical Neuro-Oncology and Co-Director, Program in Pediatric Low-Grade Astrocytoma, Dana Farber Cancer Institute