The CBTTC consists of 18 international institutions that aims to support transformative research for pediatric brain tumours. More than 2,500 participants have been enrolled by CBTTC to date and over 40,000 biospecimens have been collected and annotated with clinical, pathological, imaging and genomic data. Available biospecimens include flash frozen tumour tissues, FFPE blocks, Blood, CSF, Plasma and their extracted DNA/RNA. All clinical, genomic and biospecimen details are managed through CBTTC’s
open-source platforms: Kids First Data Resource Centre (kidsfirstdrc.org) provides a platform for genomic and clinical data from patients with cancer or birth defects. CAVATICA (cavatica.org) is a cloud-based computing platform that allows researchers to analyze CBTTC datasets in a fast, secure and collaborative manner. All genomic and transcriptomic datasets have been granted access to Dr. Pugh’s lab and we have
been actively using them for our immunogenomics project described in section preliminary results (CBTTC Data Project 30 “Immunogenomic landscape of pediatric cancers” (https://cbttc.org/scientific-projects-data/)).The CBTTC provides a large cohort of samples from children and young adults with brain tumours.
There are several sets of serial frozen tissues from patients with low- grade gliomas with matching bulk whole genome and RNAseq data. Longitudinal clinical, treatment and genomic data are available from these samples making them a unique valuable sample set to address our specific aims. CBTTC’s sample collection and storage are compatible with our nuclei-sequencing protocols and by querying the specimen inventory system, we have identified a set of samples that a minimum of 25 mg tissue is available to request. We currently do not use/intend to request any specimens from other sources for this project.
