Tumor samples collected through the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) helped power a collaborative study identifying potential treatment targets and markers associated with outcomes in children, adolescents, and young adults with high-grade glioma.
Published in Cell Reports Medicine, the Mount Sinai-led study brought together CBTN, the National Cancer Institute’s Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) and the Philadelphia Coalition for a Cure(PC4C), including researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s (CHOP) Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b).
Researchers examined DNA, RNA, and proteins in tumors from 112 patients and found distinct biomarkers and disease outcomes based on age and sex. They also identified several potential treatment targets, including CDK8, that warrant further investigation.
“Rare tumors require a collaborative approach,” said Mateusz Koptyra, PhD, CBTN Lab Director and a co-first author of the study. “By connecting those samples with clinical and molecular data, the network created a resource no single institution could assemble alone. The result provide a more precise understanding of the disease and specific leads researchers can now pursue.”
High-grade gliomas remain difficult to treat. This new context of tumor biological differences could help researchers develop more precise therapies and design clinical trials that better account for patients’ developmental stages.
The findings require further validation. With the study’s molecular data publicly available, researchers can build on this work and extend the value of the samples shared through CBTN.
