Project Team
Raushan Kurmasheva, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator & Assistant Professor
Greehey Children's Cancer Research Institute
Dr. Raushan Kurmasheva received research training in Vienna Biocenter (Austria) and during the courses of subsequent postdoctoral fellowships, at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In 2010, she joined the NCI-funded Pediatric Preclinical Testing Program (PPTP) to serve as Scientific Coordinator of the overall Program and then as Co-Principal Investigator in 2015-2021. This program was funded as the Pediatric-In Vivo-Testing (PIVOT) Consortium (sarcoma, renal, and liver cancer focus; 2021-2026), which she co-leads with Dr. Peter Houghton. She published 87 peer-reviewed research articles and has contributed to more than 50 publications reporting the PPTP and PPTC results. Dr. Kurmasheva is currently appointed to Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine, as well as Principal Investigator at the GCCRI at the University of Texas Health at San Antonio. Her laboratory research is aimed at deciphering mechanisms of resistance to pediatric sarcoma therapy, with preclinical therapeutic focus on reducing toxicity and employing novel systems for drug delivery. She is a member of POETIC (Pediatric Oncology Experimental Therapeutics Investigators’ Consortium), PI on the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and serves as the UT Health SA Designated Animal Research Officer (DARO) for the GCCRI.
Peter Houghton, Ph.D.
Professor
Greehey Children's Cancer Research Institute
Dr. Peter J. Houghton received his Ph.D. from the University of London (Institute of Cancer Research) 1977, he joined the faculty of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee and became Chair of Molecular Pharmacology (1992-2009) and co-lead for the Solid Malignancies Program (1988-2009). Dr. Houghton became Director, Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases, Nationwide Children’s Hospital (2009-2014), and subsequently Director Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Inst. San Antonio (2014-2020); He is Professor Emeritus, Molecular Medicine, UTHSA, and has published approximately 380 peer-reviewed articles focused on childhood cancer. He pioneered development of patient derived xenografts (PDXs) as preclinical models and has used these to develop novel therapeutics largely focused on pediatric sarcoma and more recently on BRAF-mutant glioma. Dr. Houghton is currently supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).
Siyuan Zheng, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Greehey Children's Cancer Research Institute
Dr. Zheng received his PhD in bioinformatics from Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009. He did his postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical School (2009-2011) and MD Anderson Cancer Center (2011-2014). He started his group at GCCRI in 2017 after spending nearly 3 years at MD Anderson as an instructor (2015-2017). In this research he uses computational approaches and genomic datasets to understand how genetic events drive cancer initiation, progression, and responses to therapeutics in children and adults. Dr. Zheng have published more than 80 papers in peer reviewed journals. These publications have been cited more than 19,000 times. In collaboration with Drs. Houghton and Kurmasheva, his group has been developing tools and analyzing genomic datasets on xenograft models of pediatric cancer. He is a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research.