Ivy Brain Tumor Center
Phoenix, United States
Shwetal Mehta is associate professor of neurobiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute and the eputy director of the Ivy Brain Tumor Center. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and obtained her postdoctoral training from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at the Harvard Medical School. She joined Barrow Neurological Institute in 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Barrow Brain Tumor Research Center.
She has a multidisciplinary background with research expertise in molecular and cellular biology, developmental biology, and neurooncology. The main focus of the Ivy Center team is to conduct early phase clinical trials to identify ideal drug cocktails that penetrate the blood-brain barrier and target therapy-resistant cells in brain tumor patients. Her research at the Ivy Brain Tumor Center (IBTC) is focused on translating preclinical experimental paradigms to pharmacodynamics (PD)- and pharmacokinetics (PK)-based early phase clinical trials for brain tumors. Research in her laboratory is primarily focused on elucidating the signaling pathways that are critical for the survival of therapy-resistant, stem-like cells in brain cancer including the most aggressive, glioblastoma (GBM). Our goal is to understand the differences between normal neural stem/progenitor cells and cancer stem cells with the aim of precisely targeting the cancer cells. Towards that end, her laboratory utilizes a multi-disciplinary approach involving murine glioma models, patient-derived xenografts (PDX), stem cell biology, proteomics, genomics, and PK/PD-based drug trialing.