“I am humbled and grateful to be a Sontag Foundation DSA awardee. It is not often that a scientist can pursue a new research direction, but support from the Sontag Foundation will allow my lab to do just that. When embarking on a new adventure it is important to have great people around you. I am particularly excited to become a part of the Sontag community so I can interact with other outstanding investigators to generate new ideas to better understand and treat brain tumors.”

About DSA-Funded Research

The Eagen Lab will study how DNA is misfolded in brain cancer. They are specifically interested in how fusion oncoproteins aberrantly fold DNA to drive aggressive brain tumors. Fusion oncoproteins arise from genetic mutations in which two chromosomes break in half, swap halves, and then fuse back together. This mutation results in a gene fusion that adds a portion of one protein to a segment of another protein thereby creating a fusion oncoprotein. Fusion oncoproteins change which genes are turned on or off in tumor cells. However, we do not know how fusion oncoproteins control gene regulation. One of the lab’s goals is to determine how a specific fusion oncoprotein in ependymoma controls gene regulation by studying how it misfolds DNA inside cancer cells resulting in inappropriate gene expression. A second goal is to interfere with tumorigenic DNA misfolding by refolding chromosomes back into their proper shape. This is an entirely new concept in how to treat ependymoma and other brain tumors in which DNA folding is disrupted. Applying this approach to ependymoma would open new avenues to treat this and other brain cancers where DNA misfolding drives disease progression. The Eagen Lab hopes to lay the foundation for identifying new classes of drugs that are safe and effective for treating patients with brain tumors.