Our Team.
Welcome to our lab's team page. Nothing is more important to a lab than the team of researchers fueling the discoveries and technological innovation. Deeply grounded in principles of collaboration and succeeding as a group, the Purzner lab works hard but makes time to celebrate!
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Dr. Teresa Purzner MD, PhD
Principal Investigator
Dr. Teresa Purzner is a neurosurgeon scientist at Queen's University. She paused her neurosurgical training at the University of Toronto in 2021 to pursue a PhD at Stanford University. During her time at Stanford she combined novel techniques in mass spectrometry with developmental neurobiology to discover new drug targets for pediatric brain tumors. In collaboration with Stanford SPARK and the pediatric brain tumor consortium, she ultimately bridged her thesis work from bench to bedside in the form of a first-in-child CK2 inhibitor clinical trial for the treatment of medulloblastoma. Dr. Purzner’s work has earned her widespread recognition both in the media and through national and international awards including the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate and BioX fellowship, Annual Award of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery, the Weston Havens Foundation award, K.G. McKenzie prize for Basic Science Research, AANS Louise Eisenhardt Award and the Neurosurgery Research and Education Fellowship. She is also the founder of Cerebelly, a babyfood company designed to support early brain development which can be found in over 14,000 stores across North America.
Dr. James Purzner MD, PhD
Principal Investigator
Dr. James Purzner is a neurosurgeon scientist at Queen's University who completed his neurosurgical residency in Toronto and his PhD at Stanford University. Dr. Purzner has two major focuses. First, he studies the intersection between early brain development and medulloblastoma, the most common pediatric brain cancer. Rather than the typical approach of promoting cell death in cancer cells, we have been reverse engineering terminal neuronal differentiation pathways that normally occur during brain development, back into cancer cells thereby driving them to differentiate into benign neurons. Differentiation therapy does not rely on apoptosis and is therefore effective in tumors that are resistant to current standard of care chemotherapy drugs. In medulloblastoma, variants with apoptotic pathway mutations have near 100% mortality.
His second focus is exploring how tumour cells interact with normal brain in glioblastomas, the most common malignant brain tumor of adulthood. By densely sampling the boundaries of the tumour and comparing the areas that led to recurrence to areas that did not recur using modern spatial genomics we will be able understand which combination of cells and neighbors are most dangerous for recurrence. ​
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