ATRT Investigators -
Toronto, Canada
Annie Huang, MD, PhD
The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) [Toronto, ON Canada]
Dr. Huang is a clinician-scientist at the Labatt Brain Tumor Research Center, Cell Biology Program, Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto, who has focused on basic science and translational research for rare embryonal brain tumors that primarily affect younger children. She established the global collaborative Rare Brain Tumor Consortium -RBTC (rarebraintumorconsortium.ca), now one of the largest clinical registry and biorepository for rare cancers, that has played an important role in advancing clinical and biological understanding of these orphan cancers. Dr Huang has played a key role in the development of consensus guidelines for classification and treatment of are brain tumors. She has also led biological studies of COG prospective trial cohorts and strategies to develop risk and biology stratified clinical trials for rare tumors including ATRT, ETMRs and Pineoblastoma in different consortia. Current and future efforts of the Huang lab are aimed at integrating deeper mechanistic understanding of tumor biology in order to develop disease specific animal models and innovative therapies.
Dr Huang established the RBTC, an international collaborative consortium of >113 centres with a clinical registry and linked biorepository of >3000 rare pediatric brain tumours to provide a much needed resource for studies of these orphan diseases. Since its inception, the RBTCs unique reagents and data sets have been used in multiple landmark discovery and clinical publications, and to inform evaluation of prospective trial cohorts.
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