Deo Prakash Pandey's project group: Targeting tumors of central nervous system

The main goal of our research is to advance the understanding of molecular mechanisms contributing to cancer and to identify and characterize novel dependencies which can be used to target cancer in patients. For a cancer model, we focus on tumors of central nervous systems which are some of the worst malignancies that afflict mankind. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent and aggressive malignant tumor of the central nervous system. Glioblastoma is rapidly fatal and with the current treatment regimes, the median overall survival is less than 15 months for GBM patients, therefore advances in translational and basic scientific understanding of processes in GBM are needed.

We use clinically relevant mouse in vivo and in vitro GBM models to study gliomagenesis and validate our findings in the primary human glioma neural stem (GNS) cells derived from GBM patients. The mouse and human GBM cellular models are derived from neural stem cells and the characterization of genes required for their proliferation is a major focus of our research.

Aside from standard molecular biology tools, we apply CRISPR/Cas9 technology to carry out loss-of-function experiments and to edit endogenous loci in the genome. Furthermore, we use a variety of high-throughput sequencing to study gene regulation including RNA-seq, meRIP-seq, ChIP-seq, CLIP-seq and SLAM-seq.