Newswise — UT Southwestern is joining with medical centers around the nation to apply advanced sequencing to pediatric brain tumors as part of the National Cancer Institute’s new Molecular Characterization Initiative, a subset of the Cancer Moonshot Childhood Cancer Initiative.
The goal is to expand the use of biomarker testing for children, adolescents, and young adults with brain and central nervous system tumors to improve diagnoses, advance research, and guide more patients into clinical trials.
The 200 participating centers are part of the National Cancer Institute’s Children’s Oncology Group formed to foster data-sharing and research collaboration. Under this initiative, researchers will apply advanced genetic sequencing and database utilization technologies to test tumor and blood DNA and RNA collected from pediatric patients. Children can be enrolled through Project:EveryChild.
“Today’s advanced genetic sequencing gives us the ability to look at the DNA changes within the tumor, helping to identify difficult-to-diagnose tumors much better,” said Laura Klesse, M.D., Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Pediatrics who is leading the initiative at UT Southwestern. “On a broader scale, this will enable a rapid growth in the databanks for these diseases, enhancing research efforts to understand what drives these tumors.”
Brain tumors are the second most common tumor type among pediatric patients and the No. 1 cause of disease death. “We’ve really done a great job of increasing survival rates in some cancers, like leukemia, where over 80% of kids are now long-term survivors,” said Dr. Klesse, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Children’s Health and member of UTSW’s Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. “But with brain tumors and some of the rarer soft tissue sarcomas, advancements have plateaued in some ways. If we can understand them on a molecular level – what biological changes drive these to form – we can try to target these with drug therapies.”’
