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Susan L. Cohn, MD

  • Professor of Pediatrics
    Committee on Cancer Biology
    Committee on Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics
  • Clinical Interests: Neuroblastoma, Pediatric Hematology, Pediatric Oncology, Solid Tumors in Children, Stem cell transplantation/bone marrow transplantation
  • Research and Scholarly Interests: Biomarkers, Clinical Trials as Topic, Epigenetics, Neuroblastoma, pediatric oncology
  • Websites: Research Network Profile
  • Contact: scohn1@uchicago.edu
  • Graduate Programs: Cancer Biology, UChicago Biosciences

Our long-term research interest is to improve the outcome for children with neuroblastoma. We are conducting laboratory-based research focused on understanding the cellular pathways that drive clinically aggressive neuroblastoma growth in order to identify actionable mutations that can be targeted and tested in clinical trials. We have an active collaboration with Drs. Chuan He and Lucy Godley investigating the epigenetic landscape of neuroblastoma. We are also collaborating with Dr. Sam Volchenboum and Dr. Robert Grossman to build an International Neuroblastoma Risk Group (INRG) Data Commons that contain phenotype data on a large cohort of neuroblastoma patients diagnosed around the world. The database was built with technology that allows connections with other databases that contain clinical and genomic information on patients with neuroblastoma diagnosed around the world. These data are available to investigators for data mining studies. Currently, clinical information on >20,000 patients with neuroblastoma are included in the INRG Data Commons. More than 20 research projects have been performed, and many of which would not have been possible with smaller patient cohorts.