Mariella Filbin

My research focuses on pediatric brain tumors, particularly high-grade gliomas and  other malignant brain tumors that are in greatest need of therapeutic improvements. I am especially interested in how the specific developmental and cellular contexts in which tumorigenic mutations arise shape the cellular hierarchy of the resulting tumors. This developmental “fingerprint” can then be used to design novel therapies that either enable differentiation of tumor cells so they are no longer proliferating or induce tumor cell death. In my studies I am combining single-cell genetics and transcriptomics with gene editing-, epigenetic-, stem cell- and pharmacologic methods to identify these cellular states, hierarchies and networks underlying tumorigenesis, with the goal of establishing new druggable targets.