UC San Francisco neuroscientist Cathryn Cadwell, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery and Pathology, has been named one of the four recipients of the 2024 Distinguished Scientist Award (DSA) from the Sontag Foundation.
The award provides $750,000 over the next five years to support her lab’s work studying how brain tumors rewire neural circuits.
People with a type of low-grade brain tumor known as an IDH-mutant diffuse glioma often experience seizures as well as difficulties with their memory, concentration and executive function. Recent UCSF-led studies have demonstrated that these cognitive symptoms, which can greatly impact patients’ quality of life, are caused by the tumor’s ability to restructure the circuitry in the brain.
By understanding how brain cells form the networks of connections that give rise to complex behavior, Cadwell’s research seeks to uncover what goes wrong with this process in neurological diseases.
“The DSA award will allow my group to extend our efforts to study how infiltrating tumor cells reshape the underlying circuits in the cerebral cortex to promote excitability at the expense of efficient information processing,” she said.
Cadwell and her research group are at the forefront of developing new methods to study the properties of the many different types of cells in the brain and how these neurons connect to each other. For example, she developed a protocol for analyzing the gene expression patterns of single neurons while measuring their electrical properties and cellular structure. The technique, known as Patch-seq, has been helping researchers characterize the diversity of brain cells and their wiring diagrams in specific regions of the brain.
Her team has also recently designed a high-throughput process for mapping circuitry that completely changes how neuroscientists study neural connectivity. This pioneering approach – supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative CONNECTS Program – allows the scientists to assess thousands of connections between individual neurons from a single experiment.
She is working closely with UCSF neurosurgeon and Glial Tumor Neuroscience Program director Shawn Hervey-Jumper, MD, to apply these methods in tissue specimens generously donated by patients with low-grade gliomas undergoing surgery to remove their tumor.
“Ultimately, we hope to identify new therapeutic targets to improve cognition, reduce seizure burden and slow tumor progression in patients living with diffuse gliomas,” she said.
As one of the largest private funders in brain tumor research, the Sontag Foundation has been supporting high-risk projects poised to yield groundbreaking results since 2003. Cadwell now joins a cohort of exceptional scientists, including neurosurgery colleagues Tomasz Nowakowski, PhD, and Daniel Lim, MD, PhD.
“I hope to build new collaborations in the glioma neuroscience space and work together to come up with innovative ideas that will push the field forward,” she said.
