Research laboratories: neurology and neurosurgery, johns hopkins medicine

The aim of the Johns Hopkins Brain Cancer Biology and Therapy Laboratory is to discover the genetic and genomic changes that cause brain cancer. These molecular changes are evaluated for his or her potential as therapeutic targets and therefore are frequently mutated genes, or genes which are over-expressed during the introduction of a brain cancer. The mind cancers the Riggins Laboratory research is medulloblastomas and glioblastomas. Medulloblastomas are the most typical malignant brain tumor for kids and glioblastomas are the most typical malignant brain tumor for adults. Both tumors take time and effort to deal with, and new therapies are urgently required for these cancers.

Our laboratory uses large-scale genomic methods to locate and evaluate the genes which are mutated during brain cancer development. The technologies we currently employ can handle searching almost all of a cancer genome for molecular alterations that can result in cancer. The brand new molecular targets for cancer therapy are first located by massive gene expression analysis, whole-genome scans for altered gene copy number and throughput sequence analysis of cancer genomes. Modifications we discover will be studied in-depth to find out the way they lead to the introduction of cancer, whether it’s promoting tumor growth, improving the ability for that cancer to invade into normal tissue, or stopping the different fail-safe mechanisms programmed into our cells.