Prerna Kumar, MD

Dr. Prerna Kumar is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Hematology/Oncology. She completed her medical education at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, her pediatrics residency at the University of Colorado Children’s Hospital Colorado, and her pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital.

Throughout her medical training, her passion for medicine and research has stemmed from her commitment to patient care and her mission to improve children’s health. In fellowship, she focused her research on neuroblastoma. In the lab, she investigated potential radio-sensitizing agents and demonstrated that Aurora kinase A inhibition, in combination with radiation in cell lines, and 131I-MIBG therapy in mouse models, led to increased cell death in cell lines and decreased tumor growth in in vivo models of high-risk neuroblastoma. This work has been published. As a junior faculty member, she transitioned her focus from translational research to clinical research and had the opportunity to work with a multi-disciplinary team and describe the late neurocognitive and adaptive outcomes for a treated neuroblastoma cohort with opsoclonus-myoclonus-ataxia syndrome (OMAS) from the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) study ANBL00P3. She additionally was awarded a grant through the National Cancer Institute STAR ACT Young Investigator Initiative to study the outcomes associated with upfront exposure to 131I-MIBG therapy for high-risk neuroblastoma patients on COG protocol ALTE15N2 through the COG Outcomes and Survivorship Committee. This work was recently presented at ANR 2025 and ASCO 2025.

As a faculty member at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria, she has had the great privilege to engage in scholarly work and clinical research in a variety of topics. She was accepted into a selective 18 month long professional development program, the Caterpillar Faculty Scholars Fellowship, which focused on teaching, research, and leadership. As part of her research as a Caterpillar Faculty Scholars Fellow, she investigated the incidence and extent of peripheral neuropathy (PN) in pediatric oncology patients receiving vincristine and levofloxacin (VL) compared to vincristine alone (VA) and found that exposure to levofloxacin in addition to vincristine in pediatric oncology patients significantly increased the burden of peripheral neuropathy. Increased awareness of the side effects of levofloxacin should guide pediatric oncology providers’ prescribing practices, particularly in the era of increasingly widespread use of antimicrobial prophylaxis. This work has been published. She and her colleagues additionally studied epigenetic aging in childhood cancer survivors. This work was funded by two Children’s Hospital of Illinois research grants. Their work showed increased biological age compared to chronological age (also known as increased epigenetic age) in childhood cancer survivors when compared to sibling controls. Increased epigenetic age was also identified in patients who received radiation when compared to their healthy siblings. Epigenetic modulation via DNA methylation may be a potential mechanism underlying the aging process in childhood cancer survivors. This work has been published.