Sandro Santagata, MD, PhD

Sandro Santagata, MD, PhD, Brigham & Women's Hospital

Medical Education:

• Mount Sinai Medical School, 2002

Internship:

• Mount Sinai Medical Medical Center, Internal Medicine, 2003

Residency:

• Anatomic Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 2005
• Neuropathology , Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 2007

Clinical Interests:

Chemical biology, genetics of brain tumors.

Dr. Santagata’s research focuses on identifying transcriptional pathways that are central to the pathobiology of human disease. He uses both genetic and chemical biology approaches to elucidate and characterize these pathways. His interest in protein-DNA interactions began as a graduate student at Mount Sinai Medical School while working with colleagues at the National Research Center in Italy to determine that mutations in the V(D)J DNA recombinase lead to Omenn Syndrome, an autosomal recessive form of immunodeficiency. As a pathologist-in-training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital he explored the use of lineage-dependent transcriptional regulators as diagnostic markers in cancer.

In his K08-funded fellowship in Susan Lindquist’s lab at the Whitehead Institute Dr. Santagata has subsequently focused on understanding the role of transcriptional regulators of stress-response pathways in human disease. The main focus has been on understanding the role of Heat Shock Factor 1 (HSF1), the master transcriptional regulator of the heat shock response, in oncogenesis. With colleagues in Susan Lindquist’s lab, he has helped establish that HSF1 is critical for tumor formation and growth and that activation of HSF1 is a prognostic marker of poor outcome in cancer. In NIH R03-funded research has have conducted large-scale chemical biology screens with colleagues at the Broad Institute to identify chemical modulators of HSF1 activity. He is currently characterizing the protein targets of these compounds. The new focus is identifying both pan-lineage and lineage-selective transcriptional regulators in brain tumors such as meningioma and glioma. The importance of these transcription factors will be determined using both genetic techniques and archival tissue samples from the Nurses’ Health Study. Chemical manipulation of these critical transcriptional regulators will be of great interest.