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Diseases
Technologies
Divisions
  • Cancer Sub-Division 3

About

My research interest is in developing personalized therapies for brain cancer, through the advanced investigation of the molecular features of cancer. This expertise, together with Dr Sarah Best (personalised oncology) and Dr Jim Whittle (clinical) provides the multidisciplinary foundations of the Brain Cancer Research Laboratory.

The research interests of the lab include:

  • Research that is patient-centred and informed by consumers 
  • Integrating advanced diagnostics together with clinical data to discover new biomarkers
  • Applying deep learning to identify prognostic biomarkers
  • Developing new pre-clinical models of brain cancer
  • Dissecting glioma heterogeneity and its microenvironment
  • Identifying existing drugs for repurposing in brain cancer
  • Establishing innovative clinical trial design strategies to progress new treatments and combinations for patients
  • Support and collaboration across brain cancer research fields

Publications

Selected publications from Dr Saskia Freytag

Herring CA, Simmons RK, Freytag S, Poppe D, Moffet JJD, Pflueger J, Buckberry S, Vargas-Landin DB, Clément O, Echeverría EG, Sutton GJ, Alvarez-Franco A, Hou R, Pflueger C, McDonald K, Polo JM, Forrest ARR, Nowak AK, Voineagu I, Martelotto L, Lister R. Human prefrontal cortex gene regulatory dynamics from gestation to adulthood at single-cell resolution. Cell. 2022;185(23):10.1016/j.cell.2022.09.039

Freytag S, Lister R. schex avoids overplotting for large single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets. Bioinformatics. 2020;36(7):10.1093/bioinformatics/btz907

Freytag S, Tian L, Lönnstedt I, Ng M, Bahlo M. Comparison of clustering tools in R for medium-sized 10x Genomics single-cell RNA-sequencing data. F1000Research. 2018;7:10.12688/f1000research.15809.1

Freytag S, Burgess R, Oliver KL, Bahlo M. brain-coX: investigating and visualising gene co-expression in seven human brain transcriptomic datasets. Genome Medicine. 2017;9(1):10.1186/s13073-017-0444-y

Causer A, Lu T, Kriel J, Moffet JJD, Fitzgerald CCJ, Newman A, Vu H, Tan X, Vo T, Cui C, Narayana VK, Whittle JR, Best SA, Freytag S, Nguyen Q. SpaMTP: integrative statistical analysis and visualization of spatial metabolomics and transcriptomics data. Nature Methods. 2026;23(8):10.1038/s41592-026-03140-8

Pandya T, Zagorulya M, Leung MM, Augustine M, Liu LY, Leppä A-M, Baruchel U, Ng SW, Klockner T, Mugabo M, Griffen AJ, Blyuss O, Iliakis CS, Grenov A, Haase K, Muller DC, Chan KH, Wu J, Burk VA, Wright N, Le Marois A, Pazukhina E, Ward S, Slawinski H, Pelletier M, Murphy C, Park MD, Snoeks T, Suarez-Bonnet A, Priestnall SL, Hardas A, Grieco C, Archer A, Celik A, Jimenez-Sanchez A, Scott R, Zahed H, Montégut L, Meza R, Durney CH, Lam S, Karasaki T, Vermeulen RCH, Xu H, Serrano-Fernandez P, Crnogorac-Jurcevic T, Menon U, Apostolidou S, Zaikin A, Gunu R, Whitwell HJ, Huang Z, Li Z, Hu X, Zhu B, Li L, Chirlaque M-D, Guevara M, Kolijn PM, Guenoun A, Mookherjee N, Johansson M, Wang Z, Chatterjee N, Chiu C-H, Chen Z, Pe’er D, Sahai E, Freytag S, Wack A, Gunter MJ, Merad M, Zhang J, Carlsten C, Yang P-C, Chen H-Y, Platz EA, LaFave LM, Smith-Byrne K, Jamal-Hanjani M, Litchfield K, Nene NR, McGranahan N, Grönroos E, Hill W, Weeden CE, Swanton C. Plasma signals of lung tumor promotion for molecular cancer prevention. Cell. 2026;189(13):10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.005

Vo T, Savary C, Jackson ER, Douglas AM, Murdoch HJ, Jayaraman R, Bessler N, Persson ML, McEwen H, McLachlan T, Duchatel RJ, Petraello B, Agnihotri S, Anastas J, Baker SJ, Becher OJ, Castel D, Chavez L, Koldobskiy MA, Deogharkar A, Mota M, Dirks PB, Doherty R, de la Nava D, Duncan B, du Chatinier A, Galban S, Marques JG, Hanson CM, Hara T, Herrington C, Ji S, Jones C, Kleinman CL, Krug B, Lin FY, Lu QR, Messinger D, Mody RJ, Mukherji D, Parthasarathy A, Peterson E, Phoenix TN, Pichumani K, Prensner JR, Ramakrishna S, Ramsoomair CK, Sajjakulnukit P, Sarmashghi S, Syed S, Tamplin OJ, Trout M, Freytag S, Valvo VM, Wahl DR, Al-Holou WN, Wechsler-Reya RJ, Koschmann C, Venneti S, Filbin MG, Dun MD. Cutting through complexity: Spatial multi-omics in the fight against diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma/diffuse midline glioma. Neuro-Oncology Pediatrics. 2026;2(3):10.1093/neuped/wuag036

Kriel J, Moffet JJD, Lu T, Fatunla OE, Narayana VK, Valkovic A, Maluenda A, McConville MJ, Tsui E, Whittle JR, Best SA, Freytag S. An integrative spatial multi-omic workflow for unified analysis of tumor tissue. Cell Reports Methods. 2026;6(2):10.1016/j.crmeth.2026.101306

Moore Z, Storey C, Brown DV, Valkovic A, Spiteri M, Pignatelli JF, Oliver SJ, Fakhri A, Drummond KJ, Hart J, Harris L, Malinowski S, Ligon KL, Sieber OM, Whittle JR, Freytag S, Best SA. Patient-derived organoids and neurospheres recapitulate salient features of primary tumor heterogeneity. Neuro-Oncology Advances. 2026;8(1):10.1093/noajnl/vdaf247

Oppel E, Weber FV, Kendziora B, Weiss BG, Wiggenhauser PS, Ihler F, Bertlich M, Aszodi-Pump N, Spiegel JL, French LE, Freytag S, Bertlich M. Species-specific outcomes in wasp sting challenges during venom immunotherapy and their respective follow-up. Allergologie select. 2026;10(01):10.5414/alx02653e

Lab research projects

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