Daniel Webster Fults
Professor
Department of Neurosurgery and Oncological Sciences
Huntsman Cancer Institute
United States of America
Biography
Dr. Fults is Professor of Neurosurgery and Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah and holder of the M. Peter and Robyn Heilbrun endowed chair in neurosurgery. His is a board-certified neurosurgeon and a member of the brain tumor program at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. He is also an HCI investigator and member of the Cell Response and Regulation program. Dr. Fults is a clinician-scientist who has a long-standing commitment to the idea that advances in brain tumor treatment depend critically on understanding the molecular biology of this devastating disease. He has been the principal investigator of an NIH-funded research program in brain tumor biology for over 28 years. Research in Dr. Fults’s laboratory is now focused on medulloblastoma, a malignant brain tumor that arises in the cerebellum in children. Aggressive treatments, combining surgery with radiation and chemotherapy, now offer children a 70% chance of being cured, but these harsh treatments carry a high risk of causing disabling neurological side effects, including neuropsychiatric challenges, stunted body growth, and hormonal imbalance, later in life. Hope for extending disease-free survival and eliminating treatment-related neurotoxicity rests on developing new treatments that specifically target the signaling molecules that drive medulloblastoma growth. Dr. Fults studies how signaling molecules that normally govern the growth and differentiation of normal stem cells in the brain cause medulloblastoma. His experimental approach uses genetically engineered mice, in which genes can be transferred and expressed in stem cells in the brain. His research team discovered that activation of the Hedgehog signaling pathway, which is important in normal brain development, induces tumors in mice that closely resemble human medulloblastomas. In Dr. Fults’s lab, this mouse model is also used for preclinical testing of new therapies and for discovering the genes that cause medulloblastomas to metastasize to the spine, a condition that carries a grim prognosis for patients.
Research Interest
Surgery for Brain Tumors Childhood Cancer Molecular Biology Medulloblastoma
Publications
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Remke M, Ramaswamy V, Peacock J, Shih DJ, Koelsche C, Northcott PA, Hill N, Cavalli FM, Kool M, Wang X, Mack SC, Barszczyk M, Morrissy AS, Wu X, Agnihotri S, Luu B, Jones DT, Garzia L, Dubuc AM, Zhukova N, Vanner R, Kros JM, French PJ, Van Meir EG, Vibhakar R, Zitterbart K, Chan JA, Bognar L, Klekner A, Lach B, Jung S, Saad AG, Liau LM, Albrecht S, Zollo M, Cooper MK, Thompson RC, Delattre OO, Bourdeaut F, Doz FF, Garami M, Hauser P, Carlotti CG, Van Meter TE, Massimi L, Fults D, Pomeroy SL, Kumabe T, Ra YS, Leonard JR, Elbabaa SK, Mora J, Rubin JB, Cho YJ, McLendon RE, Bigner DD, Eberhart CG, Fouladi M, Wechsler-Reya RJ, Faria CC, Croul SE, Huang A, Bouffet E, Hawkins CE, Dirks PB, Weiss WA, Schuller U, Pollack IF, Rutkowski S, Meyronet D, Jouvet A, Fevre-Montange M, Jabado N, Perek-Polnik M, Grajkowska WA, Kim SK, Rutka JT, Malkin D, Tabori U, Pfister SM, Korshunov A, von Deimling A, Taylor MD (2013). TERT promoter mutations are highly recurrent in SHH subgroup medulloblastoma. Acta Neuropathol, 126(6), 917-29.
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Jenkins NC, Kalra RR, Dubuc A, Sivakumar W, Pedone CA, Wu X, Taylor MD, Fults DW (2014). Genetic drivers of metastatic dissemination in sonic hedgehog medulloblastoma. Acta Neuropathol Commun, 2(1), 85.
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Jenkins NC, Rao G, Eberhart CG, Pedone CA, Dubuc AM, Fults DW (2016). Somatic cell transfer of c-Myc and Bcl-2 induces large-cell anaplastic medulloblastomas in mice. J Neurooncol, 126(3), 415-24.
