Prolo Lab Research
Pediatric high-grade gliomas are highly invasive and poised to recur after surgical resection. The Prolo Lab uses newly developed genetic and epigenetic tools to understand what molecular pathways drive invasion, and how these pathways can be targeted for treatment. We are interested in questions such as: How do tumors change with time and in response to therapy? What genes and epigenetic changes underlie tumor cell invasion? To investigate this, we employ two approaches. The first is a bioinformatics approach to study the genomic and epigenomic diversity of pediatric high-grade gliomas at the cellular level. The second employs newly developed tools within the CRISPR/Cas9 system to modify the genome and epigenome in primary tumor cell culture and in surgically resected tumor slice models to understand how these changes contribute to tumor cell invasion.