Speaker

Dr. Sheila Singh is a Professor of Surgery and Biochemistry, University Scholar, Chief Pediatric Neurosurgeon at McMaster Children’s Hospital, Division Head of Neurosurgery at Hamilton Health Sciences, and Inaugural Director of the Centre for Discovery in Cancer Research (CDCR) at McMaster University. She holds a Tier 1/ Senior Canada Research Chair in Human Brain Cancer Stem Cell Biology, and served as founding Director of the McMaster Surgeon Scientist Program. Her PhD thesis described the novel identification of a population of cancer stem cells that exclusively drive the formation of brain tumors (SK Singh et al. Identification of human brain tumor initiating cells. Nature 2004: 7015(432): pp 396-401). Since 2007, her lab applies a developmental neurobiology framework to the study of brain tumorigenesis. Building upon previous cell culture techniques developed for the isolation of normal neural stem cells (NSC) and applying them to brain tumors, and through development of a xenograft model to efficiently study brain tumor initiating cell (BTIC) activity, her lab aims to understand the molecular mechanisms that govern BTIC selfrenewal. She has published extensively on the regulation of BTIC signaling pathways in glioblastoma, brain metastases and childhood medulloblastoma, with an ultimate goal of selectively targeting the BTIC with appropriately tailored immunotherapies and molecular therapies. Her laboratory is funded by CCSRI, CIHR, TFRI, CRS, the Stem Cell Network, McMaster Surgical Associates, Brain Canada and the Boris Family Fund. She served as scientific founder and interim CEO of a start-up company, Empirica Therapeutics, a brain cancer therapeutics company that is seeking new, data-driven and polytherapeutic treatment options for patients with Glioblastoma and brain metastases. Empirica was acquired by Century Therapeutics Inc (Philadelphia) in June 2020, resulting in the creation of a Canadian subsidiary, Century Canada, based in the McMaster Innovation Park in Hamilton. She has won many awards including most recently the 2024 Canadian Cancer Society Robert L. Noble Prize for outstanding achievements in basic biomedical cancer research, and is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the Royal Society of Canada, and a council member of AACR. She has published over 200 manuscripts in journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Cancer Research, PNAS and many others; she has 26,792 citations and her h-index is 84.

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