Cancer Therapeutics Training (CT2) Talk | Matthew Shtrahman, MD, PhD

Toxicity to Opportunity: Harnessing AAV Biology to Treat Pediatric Brain Cancers

Dr. Shtrahman received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Michigan. He returned to his hometown to obtain his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Pittsburgh, where he did his thesis work with Dr. Xiao-lun Wu in the Department of Physics. He completed his residency training and clinical neurophysiology fellowship in the Department of Neurology at UCLA. Dr. Shtrahman went on to do his postdoctoral training with Dr. Tom Otis at UCLA and subsequently Dr. Fred Gage at the Salk Institute before joining the faculty of the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD in 2016. His lab studies how adult-born and mature neurons in the brain encode memories and become altered in diseases of the nervous system. Building on work showing that the widely used recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) kills dividing neural progenitor cells and ablates neurogenesis in the murine dentate gyrus, Dr. Shtrahman and his team are investigating the molecular mechanisms as well as the translational and therapeutic implications for this phenomenon. They hope to capitalize on these findings to develop new AAV-based treatments for brain tumors and other lethal cancers that are amenable to local treatment.