Research

From the molecular biology of spinal tumors to the models that guide an operation.

Spinal Oncology

Spinal oncology is the lab's largest research area, and it's organized around a set of concrete clinical questions rather than a single tumor type: which patients are most likely to have a tumor recur, which treatment sequence gives them the best chance of avoiding that, and how do we measure whether an operation actually made someone's life better rather than just cleared a scan. That spans chordoma, chondrosarcoma, nerve sheath tumors, intramedullary spinal cord tumors, and metastatic disease to the spine.

132

papers

Spinal Injury & Regeneration

This area is built around the questions that determine how well a patient recovers after an injury to the spine or spinal cord, or after the operation meant to treat it: how quickly they get to a surgeon, what complications the surgery itself might cause, and whether the way we structure the days around an operation changes how fast someone gets back on their feet.

265

papers

Peripheral Nerve

This area is built around two kinds of questions: what's happening when a tumor grows directly out of a nerve, and how do we get the best functional outcome after a nerve has been cut, crushed, or otherwise injured. In both cases the starting point is a concrete, patient-facing question, not just what the imaging shows.

papers

Basic Science

Basic Science exists to answer the questions the clinical areas can't answer from the operating room alone: why a spine tumor behaves the way it does at a cellular level, and how to get more useful information out of the scans and data we're already collecting.

papers

Browse all 315 publications