Stanford University/VAPAHCS
Stanford, United States
My name is Stephen L. Skirboll, MD, and I currently an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and
Chief of the Neurosurgery Section, VAPAHCS. I attended medical school at University of Pennsylvania, during which I did research at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and then as a HHMI-NIH Scholar at the NIH. I received my Neurosurgical training at the University of Washington, where I also studied neurotrophins and Trk receptors. My current interest is identifying and characterizing cancer stem cells (CSCs) in GBM, and our group was one of the first to use a kinome-wide RNAi screen to identify a protein critical to maintaining GBM cells in a tumorigenic, stem-cell like state. We also discovered that mutated oncogene, EGFRvIII, can have CSC-specific expression and be used to speci!cally target this population, and we are working on a second generation peptide vaccine targeting EGFRvIII to treat GBMs. We are now presenting our work in which we employ a chemical genetics-based screen to identify a small molecule that selectively induces apoptosis in GBM CSCs and provides an approach to developing treatments for GBMs.