Dr. Samuel H. Cheshier MD, PhD, FAANS

Samuel H. Cheshier, MD, PhD, FAANS

Dr. Cheshier is an associate professor of pediatric neurosurgery and the director of surgical pediatric neuro-oncology at Primary Children’s Hospital at the University of Utah School of Medicine, with a co-appointment at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Dr. Cheshier attended medical school at Stanford University and also earned a PhD in immunology, conducting basic science research on the cell cycle kinetics of hematopoietic stem cells. Following his neurosurgical residency at Stanford University Hospital and Clinics, he then studied the effect of Wnt proteins on mid-brain stem cells and embryonic stem cells at Lund University in Sweden as part of a Van Wagenen Fellowship. He then performed a pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario and was faculty at Stanford University from 2010 to 2018. His basic science laboratory performs highly sophisticated experiments to understand the biology of pediatric brain tumors. He has studied the monoclonal antibody, anti-CD47, to stimulate immune cell macrophages to specifically target and remove pediatric brain cancers, emphasizing the removal of the cancer stem cells. His group has recently discovered that a subpopulation of Notch-1 expressing tumor progenitors is responsible for maintenance/self-renewal and metastasis of c-Myc driven medulloblastoma (the most virulent subtype of the most common malignant brain tumor in children). He continues to explore how Notch-1 governs the biology of these tumor progenitors and determine if they possess transcriptomic vulnerabilities that can be targeted for therapy.