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Dr Thomas W盲lchli, MD PhD, FMH, is a neurosurgeon-neuroscientist, combining clinical work as a neurosurgeon with basic and translational science as a neuroscientist and vascular and cancer biologist.
Group Leader: Dr Thomas W盲lchli
Dr. Thomas W盲lchli, MD PhD, FMH, is a neurosurgeon-neuroscientist with a surgical focus on brain tumors and an overlapping basic/translational researh focus on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the brain vasculature in development, adulthood and disease, with a special emphasis on single-cell multi-omics characterization of brain vascular endothelial cells and subsequent functional validation.聽
Recently, together with his reaserch group, he characterized the human brain vasculature across development, adulthood, and disease at single-cell resolution, thereby unraveling fundamental insights into the establishment, maintenance, and alteration of the human brain vasculature . He uncovered extensive molecular heterogeneity of the vasculature of healthy fetal and adult human brains across vascular-dependent CNS pathologies including brain tumors and brain vascular malformations. He and his team also constructed a single-cell and spatial atlas of the human COVID-19 brain and lung vasculature revealking a CNS-specific mechanism for SARS-CoV-2 endothelial cell entry. They further described the onco-fetal axis in the human brain vasculature by indetifying an inhibitory as well as a promoting cue that govern vascular growth and endothelial metabolism during brain develpoment and in brain tumors. These findings contribute to out understanding of neurodevelopmental programs that are activate in th angiogenic human fetal brain vasculature, silenced in the adult healthy brain vasculature, and reactivate in the angiogenic vasculature of glial brain tumors regulating angiogenesis and endothelial metabolism, and have potential implications in the therapeutic of glioma.
Thomas continues to be very facinated, drive, and dedicated about his career path as a brain tumour聽neurosurgeon-neuroscientist, combining clinical work as a neurosurgeon with basic and translational science as a neuroscientist and vascular and cancer biologist. Most recently, he works on the role of developmental programs that regulate vascular growth, the blood-brain-barrier, and endothelial-immune interactions in the human brain tumor vasculature.
