Gleeson Laboratory

The Gleeson Laboratory for Pediatric Brain Disease is interested in solving the mysteries of brain development, and in creating treatments for disease. Children with neurodevelopmental disease present special challenges to medicine, because we understand so little about how the brain develops and functions. Most diseases are considered 'untreatable... ', and most children are left without a diagnosis. The Gleeson Lab has expertise in assembling cohorts of patients designed to understand disease mechanisms, with a focus on CNS development. Collaborative studies have determined how the hundreds of genes identified by the lab, mutated in human disease, promote assembly of the human brain. The Lab has also found many of these diseases actually represent very early onset neurodegenerative conditions, and thus may be amenable to treatment. Using a combination of animal and stem cell models, the lab has developed ways to study the function of these individual genes and to develop new treatments. There are three major focus areas of the lab: Somatic disease, Complex disease and Mendelian disease. In Somatic disease, we focus on focal brain dysplasias and transmissible mutations arising in the gonads of the parents. In Complex disease we are uncovering genes mutated in neural tube defects, and how mutations interact with the environment. In Mendelian disease we have found several new genes mutated in families and are modeling disease in mouse and IPSC-derived brain organoids. We are recruiting graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, so please email Joseph Gleeson for questions We are fortunate to receive support from the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation for Autism Research Initiative and the Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine. Past research was funded by the Searle Scholars Fund, the Merck Program in the Developmental Disabilities, the Burroughs Welcome Fund, the American Epilepsy Foundation, the Ray Thomas Edwards Foundation, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Gleeson graduated ...Read More