Pratiti “Mimi” Bandopadhayay, MBBS, Ph.D.

Pratiti “Mimi” Bandopadhayay is an institute member at the Broad Institute and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She is also a pediatric neuro-oncologist and scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, where she cares for young patients with brain tumors. She also directs the Pediatric Low-Grade Glioma program at DFCI.

Bandopadhayay is a pioneer in advancing precision medicine approaches for pediatric brain tumors — the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children. New treatments are desperately needed for pediatric cancer patients, particularly those with brain tumors that are currently untreatable. Many pediatric brain tumors are difficult to remove surgically, so Bandopadhayay has made it her mission to decipher the genetics of some of the most complex tumor types, particularly those with no treatment options, in order to find drugs that target their specific mutations. That includes applying integrative genomic approaches that identify genetic dependencies — mutations that the tumors need to survive — in pediatric brain tumors and other factors that contribute to treatment resistance. 

Bandopadhayay and her team have revealed the key genes that mediate treatment responses in an aggressive pediatric brain tumor called MYC-amplified medulloblastoma, as well as the cellular makeup of low-grade astrocytomas, the most common type of pediatric brain tumor, revealing potential new targets for safer therapies. Her lab also has significant efforts focused on understanding the drivers of high-grade gliomas — one of the most aggressive types of childhood cancers. 

Bandopadhayay completed her medical studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; Ph.D.  at the University of Melbourne; and specialty training in pediatrics and hematology/oncology at Royal Children’s Hospital and Monash Medical Center in Melbourne and the Australasian College of Physicians. She then completed a fellowship in pediatric neuro-oncology at Boston Children's Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Shortly after she joined the Broad as a postdoctoral fellow. Bandopadhayay initiated her own independent research group in 2017.