University of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Braden McFarland, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She obtained her Ph.D. in Neurobiology with a focus on Neuro-Oncology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2009 under the mentorship of Dr. Candece Gladson. During her doctorate training, she pursued efforts in understanding the migration and invasion of glioblastoma (GBM) cells, and extensive training in anti-angiogenic therapy. She then completed her postdoctoral fellowship studying aberrant protein signal transduction and tumor immunology in GBM at UAB under the mentorship of Dr. Etty (Tika) Benveniste. In 2015, she was promoted to Instructor in the Cell Developmental and Integrative Biology Department at UAB, and as of 2019 was promoted to Assistant Professor.
Her research interests are centered around discovering new therapies for patients with GBM, which include pharmacological inhibition of the JAK/STAT pathway in patient-derived xenograft models, exploiting inflammatory (anti-tumor) macrophages to enhance standard of care in immunocompetent models, and understanding how the gut microbiome is altered by the diet as well as by certain drug therapies in mouse models of glioma. Currently, she has established a humanized microbiome mouse model, in which human fecal samples are transplanted into gnotobiotic (germ-free) mice to successfully colonize the mouse GI tract with human microbes. This model is critical because it allows the study of the relationship between the human microbiome among different human samples (and potential GBM patients), and the responsiveness to therapies in a mouse model used for GBM studies. These studies will determine how various human gut microbiota profiles can influence tumor growth and responsiveness to therapy.
