Robert Wechsler-Reya, PhD, Awarded V Foundation Translational Grant

Robert Wechsler-Reya, PhD, scientific director of brain tumor research at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC), has recently been awarded a V Foundation Translational Grant for his innovative research in identifying new targets and potential therapies for pediatric brain tumors. The grant, which supports “bench to bedside” research, provides $800,000 of funding over four years. Dr. Wechsler-Reya's award is specially funded by the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund, which supports innovative childhood cancer research.  

The Winning Project

Wechsler-Reya's project, titled “Precision Medicine and Precision Delivery for Diffuse Midline Glioma” aims to improve personalized therapeutic approaches for diffuse midline glioma (DMG), a highly aggressive brain tumor that mainly affects children.  The median survival rate is less than a year, and more effective treatments are desperately needed. These tumors vary greatly between patients and even from cell to cell within the tumor itself, meaning that effective therapies will likely require a highly personalized approach using unique combinations of drugs for each patient. 

Wechsler-Reya's multi-pronged approach will utilize high-throughput screening to identify drugs that are effective against DMG patient samples. Cells from the same patients will be used to create patient-specific tumor models, which will be used to test the effectiveness of individual drugs and drug combinations in vitro. Finally, researchers will use convection enhanced delivery to deliver drugs directly into the tumors, testing the effectiveness of these drugs at shrinking tumors in animals. If these studies are successful, the approach could ultimately be tested in clinical trials for patients with DMG and other brain tumors.   

About Dr. Wechsler-Reya

Dr. Wechsler-Reya, H. Houston Merritt Professor of Neurological Sciences in neurology and at the HICCC, joined the faculty at Columbia in 2022. Prior to Columbia, Wechsler-Reya was director of the Tumor Initiation and Maintenance Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute. The Wechsler-Reya lab focuses on the signals that control cell growth and differentiation in the nervous system and how these signals are dysregulated in brain tumors. Wechsler-Reya also works closely with the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) to translate his lab’s research into trials, with the goal of developing safer and more effective therapies for children with brain tumors.