Brain Tumor Center at Washington University School of Medicine
St. Louis, United States
Alexander H. Stegh is a Northwestern Adjunct Professor of Neurology, a Professor of Neurosurgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and the Research Director of the Brain Tumor Center at Siteman Cancer Center. He obtained his Diploma in Biochemistry from the Leibniz University in Hannover. His graduate studies were carried out at the German Cancer Center in Heidelberg and the Ben-May Institute for Cancer Research, culminating in a PhD in 2000. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Ronald DePinho, where he became interested in functional genomics. After promotion to instructor at Dana-Farber in 2007, Stegh joined Northwestern as an Assistant Professor in 2009, with appointments at the Davee Department of Neurology and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. In January 2022, he was named the Research Director of the Brain Tumor Center at Siteman Cancer Center, based at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Stegh’s research is focused on understanding the genetic underpinnings of malignant brain tumors, in particular Glioblastoma, and developing novel precision medicine approaches to combat this malignancy. Dr. Stegh’s basic research program discovered novel oncogenes that contribute to the ability of Glioblastoma to antagonize therapy-mediated programmed cell death, and identified novel mechanisms of metabolic adaptation in Glioblastoma. Dr. Stegh is known for his bench-to-beside efforts to leverage the unique properties of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), i.e., the three-dimensional radial arrangements of nucleic acids on organic or inorganic nanoparticle cores, for biotherapeutic gene-regulation and immunostimualtion. These efforts have resulted in the first in-human clinical trial of gene-regulatory SNAs for the treatment of recurrent Glioblastoma.