Recent Advances

Sarah DeWeerdt, reporter for The Transmitter, interviews Dr. Gutmann and other leaders in the Cancer Neuroscience field. Read this excellent feature article at https://www.thetransmitter.org/neurobiology/making-cancer-nervous/

Previous studies performed in collaboration with Professor Kettenmann at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin found that Nf1-mutant mice have a sex-dependent defect in microglia function. In this prior work, we showed that only male Nf1-mutant microglia have impaired purinergic signaling. These male Nf1-mutant microglia also have reduced process arborization and surveillance capacity. In this […]

September 2022 One of the major barriers to identifying and evaluating new therapies for pediatric low-grade brain tumors is their inability to grow in culture or in mice. Leveraging human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) engineering, RNA sequencing, and genetically engineered mouse strains, Dr. Corina Anastasaki and colleagues devised methods to bypass this limitation in […]

By Tamara Bhandari May 19, 2022 People with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) develop tumors on nerves throughout their bodies. These tumors are usually benign — meaning they don’t spread to other parts of the body and are not considered life threatening — but they can still cause serious medical problems, especially when they form in […]

As a physician who cares for children at risk of developing cancer, I am interested in defining the factors that contribute to tumor formation and progression. Our clinical and laboratory research team is focused on the Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) cancer predisposition syndrome, in which children are prone to the development of low-grade brain tumors […]