Development of a New Therapy Against Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is a rare childhood brain cancer that is very often fatal. Researchers believe that ion channels, pore-forming proteins that move chemicals like calcium and potassium in and out of cells, have a role in drug resistance. Drug resistance refers to a reduction in the effectiveness of a particular treatment. Blocking ion channels may improve the efficacy of targeted therapies. Many of the ion channel drugs researchers plan to use are already approved for clinical use. This means that their approach could be rapidly moved into clinical trials, speeding up the rate at which these therapies can actually be used for patients. To complete this analysis, DIPG data will be analyzed for the expression of ion channels and clinical data will be used to ascertain basic demographic information about the samples such as sex and age. In this study, researchers will use this data from the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas to determine what ion channels are found in DIPG cells.