Brookline Doctor Awarded $100K Grant for Groundbreaking Brain Tumor Research

The following is a news release:

The American Brain Tumor Association (ABTA) recently awarded Ganesh Shankar, MD, PhD, resident physician and postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, a two-year, $100,000 Basic Research Fellowship Grant. Dr. Shankar and his family are Brookline residents.

“It is a privilege to recognize extraordinary young scientists like Dr. Shankar who are just beginning their careers, and who hold the potential for greater contributions to brain tumor research in the years ahead,” Elizabeth M. Wilson, MNA, president and CEO, American Brain Tumor Association. “The ABTA’s Basic Research Fellowships show the ABTA’s commitment to attracting the best and brightest minds to the field and assisting these early career scientist in gaining a foothold in investigating the unsolved challenges of treating and caring for people diagnosed with a brain tumor.”

Under the mentorship of Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, professor of pathology and director of the Cancer Genome Discovery Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and senior associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dr. Shankar has obtained pathology specimens of astrocytomas from children treated at three centers.

Found in both the brain and spinal cord (the “central nervous system”), astrocytomas are the most common tumor directly involving the spinal cord in children. He seeks to apply next generation sequencing tools to these pediatric spinal cord astrocytomas to identify the genes that are altered in these tumor states. Better understanding these genomic changes would allow for deeper analysis of the biology of how these tumors form and the factors that make astrocytomas more aggressive. Also, this characterization would allow for enhanced precision in diagnosis. Importantly, identifying these changes in genes would also provide targets for the development of medications to control the growth of spinal cord astrocytomas.

“It is a great honor to be included among the distinguished group of scientists who received this generous funding from the American Brain Tumor Association,” said Dr. Shankar. “I look forward to having this opportunity in the lab, and hope to be a part of game-changing science that will lead to the next breakthrough discovery.”

Dr. Shankar received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Human Biology from Stanford University in Stanford, California and his Medical Degree from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He also holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Shankar is currently a resident in the Department of Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and performs research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute to identify genomic alterations in primary intramedullary

Dr. Shankar resides with his wife, Kalpana, and two children, Kailash and Shailaja, in Brookline.

Photo credit: Mass. General Hospital