Dr. Peter Morgenstern, a fourth-year neurosurgery resident at the Weill Cornell Brain and Spine Center, has been awarded a one-year fellowship from the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation (NREF) for a project entitled “The role of menin and a novel approach for targeted therapy in diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.” Dr. Morgenstern will conduct his research under the mentorship of Dr. Viviane Tabar at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
This research project includes collaborative efforts with the Weill Cornell Children’s Brain Tumor Project’s campaign to find new treatment options for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), which is the leading cause of death among children with brain tumors. The brainstem tumor, which primarily strikes children under the age of 10, currently has no effective available treatment options. (Find out more about Weill Cornell’s current clinical trial for DIPG.)
Dr. Morgenstern will be working in Dr. Tabar’s laboratory, which has expertise in human embryonic stem cell (hES) research and where investigators have developed the first hES derived model of DIPG. Using this model, researchers recently discovered that a compound targeting menin, which is involved in many cell functions in humans but has no previously identified role in DIPG, was effective at reducing tumor cell growth. The NREF fellowship will allow Dr. Morgenstern to investigate the role of menin in DIPG by studying this drug candidate’s effects on DIPG cells growing in culture and in animal models. Collaboration with researchers in Dr. Mark Souweidane’s laboratory and their expertise in local delivery of drugs to the brainstem for DIPG will further the clinical relevance of this project. The goal is to investigate how menin is involved in DIPG biology while beginning the process of developing this drug for clinical use in this deadly disease.
The Weill Cornell neurosurgery residency program is one of the top programs in the nation, and is divided between NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). The researchers of the Children’s Brain Tumor Project work in collaboration with MSKCC and many other laboratories in the quest to find new treatments for rare and inoperable pediatric brain tumors.
More about the residency program
More about the Children’s Brain Tumor Project
