Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Overview

Sean Lawler Ph.D leads the Brain Cancer Therapy Lab in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. He is affiliated with the Brown Cancer Center where he is co-leader of the CNS Cancer Translational Disease Research Group.  The Lawler Lab investigates therapeutic approaches for the treatment of Brain Cancer, from preclinical models, to the analysis of data from patient tumors, with the goal of developing the next generation of therapeutic approaches for these extremely challenging diseases.

Sean Lawler obtained his PhD from the University of London in 1992, and specialized in mammalian signal transduction mechanisms during his post-doctoral training at UCSF, INSERM and the University of Dundee, before faculty appointments at Massachussetts General Hospital, The Ohio State University, the University of Leeds, and Brigham and Women's Hospital where he has developed an expertise in translational approaches for brain tumor therapy. 

The main interests of the lab at present are 1) Drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier for cancer treatment in the brain, 2) Harnessing innate immune mechanisms to enable the effective application of immunotherapies for brain cancer, and 3) understanding the effects of a common pathogen, cytomegalovirus, on the growth of the malignant brain tumor glioblastoma.

Brown Affiliations