Anna Marie Kenney

Medulloblastomas are the most common solid malignant cancers that occur in children. These brain tumors arise in young children while the brain is still growing. Current treatments for medulloblastoma kill tumor cells and normal young brain cells, leaving survivors with devastating, life-long side effects, including behavioral, learning, and movement disorders. Better treatments have been slow in coming due to our poor understanding of what causes medulloblastomas.
It is also important to study mice that get medulloblastomas like those that children do, so we can experiment with new treatments. Many studies have shown that medulloblastomas arise from rapidly dividing immature brain cells. When these cells are dividing, they need to make many new molecules, such as proteins that carry out the specific steps of cell division. Cancer cells in particular have very high levels of new protein production.
Using drugs that block this process may be a way to treat medulloblastomas in the future. My research focuses on using brain cell cultures and mice that develop medulloblastomas to identify ways that making new proteins inside cells causes cells to divide in the normal brain and in medulloblastomas. We will also use mice that have been genetically engineered to increase the activity of protein-producing molecules. These mice often develop medulloblastomas, and will be used for testing drugs that stop new proteins from being made. We hope to learn more about how medulloblastomas are formed, and how we can treat them by attacking molecules inside the tumor cells.