PRiME Connaught Global Speaker Series
PRiME Connaught Global Speaker Series continues in April 2026 with
Dr. Sanjay Kumar, PhD
University of California, Berkeley
Keynote talk title: "Biomaterial Models of Brain Tumors: Wrong but Useful"
Abstract
The deadly brain tumor glioblastoma (GBM) is characterized by diffuse invasion of tumor cells through brain tissue. Despite major advances in surgical care and radio/chemotherapy over the past several decades, the median survival time post-GBM diagnosis remains stalled at <2 years. There is a dire need for culture paradigms that allow recapitulation and mechanistic dissection of GBM invasion in vitro as well as identification of cellular biomarkers of invasion that could be therapeutically targeted in vivo. I will describe hyaluronic acid hydrogel-based systems we have developed that enable mechanistic dissection of invasion along with systems-level omics analysis and screening. These engineered systems also accommodate stromal cells understood to contribute to tumor progression in vivo. While these reductionist, bottom-up models will never fully capture the complexity of tumor tissue, they offer advantages of scale, standardization, and tunability key to hypothesis testing. They have also facilitated comparisons with patient tumor tissue, yielding predictions that may be tested in vivo. I will discuss how we have used these bioengineered paradigms to: (1) identify and target metabolic adaptations relied upon by invasive GBM cells for continued migration; (2) probe effects of matrix viscoelastic properties on GBM collective invasion; and (3) discover factors secreted by GBM-associated macrophages that fuel infiltration of tumor cells.
About the speaker
Sanjay Kumar, M.D., Ph.D., is The E. H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at UC Berkeley (QB3-Berkeley). His primary appointment is in the Department of Bioengineering (which he chaired from 2019-22), with joint appointments in the UC Berkeley Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Kumar earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota (1996) and his M.D. and Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University (2003). He then completed postdoctoral training at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kumar has co-authored >120 peer-reviewed publications and mentored >30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He and his group have been recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, The Beckman Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Stem Cells Young Investigator Award. Dr. Kumar is an elected fellow of AAAS, AIMBE, and BMES, and he has served on the BMES and CMBE governing boards.
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Time: 2:00 - 3:00 PM
Location: Red Room, Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research (160 College St)