BENNINGTON, Vt. — The next guest on Medical Matters Weekly is Mariella Filbin, MD, PhD, a leading researcher working to find a cure to children's brain tumors. 

 

The show airs on Facebook Live at 12 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 19.

 

The show is produced by Southwestern Vermont Health Care (SVHC) with cooperation from Catamount Access Television (CAT-TV). Viewers can view on facebook.com/svmedicalcenter and facebook.com/CATTVBennington. The show is also available to view or download as a podcast on svhealthcare.org/medicalmatters.

 

Dr. Filbin is the co-director for Research for the Pediatric-Neurooncology Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's Hospital. She earned her doctoral degrees in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Medical University of Graz, Austria. After a pediatric residency at Boston Children's Hospital, she completed a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. She joined the faculty at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's as a pediatric neuro-oncologist in July 2017. In addition to her role in the treatment of patients with brain tumors, her research focuses on establishing cellular networks of tumor dependencies in pediatric brain tumors with the goal of finding new targeted therapies.

 

The Filbin Lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute studies pediatric brain tumors, particularly the lethal high-grade gliomas, including DIPG and malignant embryonal brain tumors that are in greatest need of therapeutic improvements. The team is especially interested in how the specific developmental and cellular contexts in which tumorigenic mutations arise shape the cellular hierarchy of the resulting tumors. They combine 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.

 

The show is broadcast on Facebook Live, YouTube, and all podcast platforms. After the program, the video is available on area public access television stations CAT-TV (Comcast channel 1075) and GNAT-TV's (Comcast channel 1074), as well as on public access stations throughout the United States.