James M. Olson, MD, PhD, is attending physician at Seattle Childrens Hospital and member of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC); he is professor of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology and adjunct professor of Pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and on the faculty in the Program in Molecular and Cellular Biology, the Program in Neurobiology and Behavior, and the Center for Nanotechnology. He serves as assistant program head of the pediatric oncology program at FHCRC and has mentored more than 30 graduate students and postdoctoral research fellows. He is chair of a national phase III clinical trial for high-risk medulloblastoma/PNET patients and member of the COG Biology and Translational Research Committee. Olson is principal investigator on six projects that focus on developing effective new therapies for pediatric brain tumors, methods that allow surgeons to better visualize the border of brain cancer and normal brain, and the molecular mechanisms of brain development.

My scientific and medical career has been devoted primarily to discovering and advancing new therapies for children with brain cancer. Our team invented “Tumor Paint”, a scorpion-derived peptide that delivers fluorescent molecules to cancer, with the goal of helping surgeons maximize tumor removal and minimize damage to normal tissues such as brain. Our lab’s work has led to over 10 human clinical trials, of which I lead a Phase III Children’s Oncology Group trial in 250 institutions. We have generated over 45 well characterized mouse models of pediatric brain cancer, which we share worldwide through www.btrl.org. Building on the Tumor Paint platform, we are exploring ways to deliver therapeutic drugs or immune modulators directly to cancer cell using similar targeting peptides. We are also leading a Center-wide program in protein and peptide therapeutics. In this program, we have identified over 80,000 peptide drugs in nature that we use as blueprints for drugs to treat human diseases for which there is a big unmet medical need.