17/09/2026
Ottawa, Ontario — Thursday September 17, 2026
For children diagnosed with brain tumours, treatment can be lifesaving, but it can also come with significant long-term effects. For CHEO neurosurgeon and recently appointed Scientist at the CHEO Research Institute, Dr. Michelle Kameda-Smith, finding safer and more effective therapies for pediatric brain cancer is at the heart of her research.
“Children with brain tumours deserve treatments that are not only effective, but that also minimize the long-term impacts of therapy,” said Dr. Kameda-Smith. “Our research aims to identify new therapeutic targets within the tumour’s stem cell population that could lead to more precise and effective treatments, with the potential to improve outcomes while reducing the effects children can experience after treatment.”
With a foot in both the clinical and research laboratory worlds, Dr. Kameda-Smith is uniquely positioned to connect observations from the clinic with discoveries at the bench. Her research focuses on translating these insights into clinically viable therapies. Using genomic sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and in vitro and in vivo validation of molecular targets, she studies the role of the tumour microenvironment and draws parallels with normal developmental programs to identify vulnerabilities that could be targeted therapeutically.
Focused on treatments for childhood medulloblastoma, the most common cancerous brain tumour in children, Dr. Kameda Smith credits trailblazers like Drs Lucy Rorke, Michael Taylor, Paul Northcott, Kathleen Millen and Parthiv Haldipur, for paving the way for clinician-scientists like her to think about potential disease prevention.
“We want to understand whether we can stop carcinogenesis in its tracks,” she said. “Our team has some exciting work coming out in the next few months that lays essential groundwork for this impactful research. It truly is an exciting time to be a clinician-scientist in this field.”
Dr. Kameda-Smith joins CHEO and the CHEO Research Institute with extensive experience as both a clinician and researcher. Following her PhD as part of the Clinical Investigator Program in Biochemistry at McMaster University, she trained under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Taylor as a Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Cancer Therapeutics Training Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. She has also completed multiple clinical fellowships in Pediatric Neurosurgery, serving as Chief Fellow at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, England, followed by an American Pediatric Neurosurgery Board-accredited fellowship at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).
At the CHEO Research Institute, Dr. Kameda-Smith is joining a growing number of cancer researchers with a focused goal of establishing a functional genomics laboratory studying childhood medulloblastoma. Her work brings together clinical expertise, cutting-edge genomics and a unique focus on prevention, with the goal of developing more precise treatments — and ultimately improving the lives of children affected by brain cancer.