Evaluation of Immunosignature Profile in Medulloblastoma

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor. Current therapies consist of surgical surgical removal, whole brain or spinal cord radiation or aggressive chemotherapy. The understanding of medulloblastoma biology has dramatically increased over the past 10 years, including the identification of distinct medulloblastoma subgroups. Further investigations identified subgroups within subgroups and significant differences in risk, prognosis and therapeutic options for each. Current methods used for medulloblastoma profiling can be cumbersome. Detailed tumor molecular characteristics require access to tumor tissue, which is often a challenge particularly for brain tumors, so there is an urgent need to develop noninvasive diagnostic tools. Over the past years, technologies have been developed that permit non-invasive analysis using either circulating tumor cells in the blood or cell-free circulating tumor DNA. Analysis of immune response patterns can be possible through immunosignature, which is a pattern obtained when circulating antibodies in blood are allowed to bind to a large microarray of randomized–sequence peptides affixed to solid surfaces. This non-invasive approach requires very minimal volumes of blood and presents very high sensitivity. Researchers propose to complete this analysis on medulloblastoma samples in the hopes of developing a new diagnostic tool. This work is made possible through the Children’s Brain Tumor Network contribution of 28 blood samples, 10 plasma samples and RNAseq data for this project.