Priscilla Brastianos, MD

Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Dr. Priscilla Brastianos received her BSc in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of British Columbia, where she graduated as her class valedictorian. She received multiple awards, including the Science Scholar Award, the Canadian Society for Chemistry Prize and the Violet and Blythe Eagles Undergraduate Prize in Biochemistry. She completed her medical school training and her internal medicine residency training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. While at Hopkins, she received the Johns Hopkins Medical Student Award for Excellence in Research, the national Leah J. Dickstein, MD, award for leadership and scholarship, and the Bradley Benton Davis Research Award from the American Brain Tumor Association. Following her training at Johns Hopkins, she pursued her fellowship training in hematology/oncology and neuro-oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. During her training, she received a number of awards including: ASCO Young Investigator Award, a Susan G. Komen Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, an American Brain Tumor Association Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Terri Brodeur Foundation Fellowship Award. She is now director of the Central Nervous System Metastasis Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and leads an R01-funded laboratory. Recently, she was named a ‘NextGen Star’ by the American Association for Cancer Research, and received a Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award, a Breast Cancer Research Foundation Award and a Susan G. Komen Career Catalyst Award.

Dr. Brastianos’ research focuses on understanding the genomic mechanisms that drive brain tumors. She lead studies which identified novel therapeutic targets in meningiomas, craniopharyngiomas and brain metastases. Her work in brain metastases demonstrates that brain metastases have branched evolution, and harbor clinically significant drivers that are distinct from clinically sampled primary tumors. She has translated her scientific findings to national multicenter trials. She also leads a multidisciplinary central nervous system metastasis clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.