Julien Sage, PhD

Julien Sage, PhD, grew up in France. He went to college at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and did his PhD at the University of Nice and post-doctoral training at MIT. He started his own research group at Stanford in 2004. He is currently the Elaine and John Chambers Professor in Pediatric Cancer and a Professor of Genetics at Stanford University where he serves as the co-Director of the Cancer Biology PhD program For his work on cancer genetics, he has been awarded a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Scholar Award, a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award, and an R35 Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Sage has been working on the RB tumor suppressor pathway and how inactivation of RB promotes tumorigenesis in children and adult patients. Dr. Sage became initially interested in small cell lung cancer because of the nearly ubiquitous loss of RB in this cancer type and the intriguing relationship in mice and humans between loss of RB and the growth of neuroendocrine lesions. In the past few years, the Sage lab has developed pre-clinical models for small cell lung cancer and has used these models to investigate signaling pathways driving the growth of this cancer type and to identify novel therapeutic targets in this recalcitrant cancer. A major focus of the Sage lab is to investigate how neuronal differentiation may promote the migration of SCLC cells, their metastasis, and their interactions with other cells in the tumor microenvironment, including in the brain.