Background
Dr. Christine Pratilas is a pediatric medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Oncology, Pediatrics & Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She joined the Hopkins pediatric sarcoma team in 2014.
Dr. Pratilas received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Drew University in New Jersey and her medical degree from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (now Rutgers University), where she also completed her internship and residency from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005 she was a fellow in hematology and oncology in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) Department of Pediatrics, and in the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center. She worked for three years as a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Neal Rosen’s Molecular Oncogenesis Laboratory at MSKCC.
From 2006 to 2014 she was attending in Pediatric Oncology at MSKCC, initially as a member of the Developmental Therapeutics & Lymphoma team. In 2011 she began her specialization in the care of pediatric sarcoma patients.
During her years in the lab of Dr. Rosen, a distinguished molecular pharmacologist and cell biologist, Dr. Pratilas focused her research on signal transduction, which involves figuring out how a cell’s internal molecular pathways work, and how those pathways can be molecularly controlled. This knowledge is the basis for developing promising new molecularly targeted cancer therapies, which is the focus of Dr. Pratilas’s research. One of her most important contributions to date has been to advance our understanding of how certain proteins that can be mutated in cancer, known as RAF kinases, affect a cancer cell’s behavior.
Dr. Pratilas continues her research on signal transduction pathways, concentrating on pediatric sarcomas, in order to develop novel therapeutics for children with these tumors.
Patient Ratings & Comments
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