Post-doctoral Fellowship Grant Awarded to Xu Zhang

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is the most aggressive and deadly childhood brain tumor. The median overall survival after diagnosis is about 9 months and currently no treatments are available for DIPG. Therefore, there is an urgent and unmet need for novel therapeutic targets for this deadly disease. We have extensive experiences on studying on how oncogenic mutations reprogram epigenome in DIPG. In this proposal, we discovered that DIPG tumor cells rely on the non-canonical WNT signaling pathways for the proliferation and survival. Based on these exciting preliminary studies, we will further characterize this pathway in DIPG and identify additional druggable targets for this deadly disease. These studies will deepen our understanding of DIPG tumors and facilitate developing novel therapeutic strategies for DIPG. These targets along with other potential drug targets (EZH2, HDAC, etc.) also offer potential combinatory therapies for the treatment and eventually cure of this deadly disease.