Media contact: Cindy Starr
(513) 558-3505
cindy.starr@uc.edu

The UC Brain Tumor Center is seeking an esteemed researcher who will lead efforts to understand, target and prevent the spread of metastatic cancer to the brain. The researcher, who would collaborate with researchers at the UC Neuroscience and Cancer Institutes, would hold the prestigious Harold C. Schott Endowed Brain Tumor Molecular Therapeutics Chair.

The institutes are joint initiatives of the UC College of Medicine and UC Health.

The Schott Endowed Chair, which recently became fully funded, will support a researcher to lead the Brain Tumor Center’s Molecular Therapeutics Program, which is dedicated to finding vulnerable targets within cancer cells and their environment and for translating those discoveries into potential treatments for patients.

The Molecular Therapeutics Program was established in 2011 with a $2 million pledge from the Harold C. Schott Foundation and $4.5 million in additional funds from the UC College of Medicine and its Departments of Neurosurgery and Radiation Oncology and the Division of Hematology Oncology. The program hired its first researcher, Atsuo Sasaki, PhD, in 2012.

Of the 215,000 Americans who are diagnosed with brain tumors each year, more than 170,000 have a cancer that has spread to the brain from another part of the body, typically the lung, breast or skin.

“Metastatic brain tumors get far less attention than primary brain tumors from the general public and the media, yet they impact far more people,” says Ronald Warnick, MD, Director of the UC Brain Tumor Center and the John M. Tew Jr., MD, Chair in Neurosurgical Oncology. “If we can gain a better understanding of what causes tumor cells to break away and spread to the brain, we can potentially extend the lives of thousands of individuals.”

Areas of focus within the Molecular Therapeutics Program include 1) counteracting the invasiveness of metastatic cells; 2) interrupting tumor-microenvironment interactions; and 3) discovering the root causes of the genetic and epigenetic program of brain metastasis.

The holder of the chair also would lead the metastatic program within the UC Brain Tumor Center while recruiting additional junior faculty investigators to help accelerate research.

The recruitment of candidates for the Schott Chair will be led by James Herman, PhD, Director of the UC Neuroscience Institute’s Neurobiology Research Center. The search committee includes representatives from across the research and clinical landscape at UC and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Their first meeting was held Nov. 9.