Personalized Therapy for High-risk Ependymoma of Childhood

Ependymoma is a common pediatric brain tumor and current treatments are limited to surgery and radiation even in very young children. Both supratentorial and posterior fossa ependymoma are relatively chemotherapy resistant and as such, new treatment options are greatly needed. In order to identify new targets for therapy, researchers have previously identified several signaling pathways, including the Ras/MAPK pathway, which are specific to ependymoma. Given these results, researchers hypothesize that targeting these pathways is a rational treatment approach for childhood ependymoma. This project aims to perform chemical and genetic screening of therapeutic vulnerabilities in childhood ependymoma models followed by experiments to validate any identified therapeutic options. The limited availability of high quality ependymoma models has held back the progress of this work, but samples provided by the Children’s Brain Tumor Network will fill this gap.