Collaboration for the Interpretation of Molecular and Genomic Data to Improve Outcomes for Children with Medulloblastoma

A goal of a new collaborative effort is to discover biomarkers that predict metastasis of the cancer in young patients with medulloblastoma, the most common type of brain tumor in children.

NextBio (Santa Clara, CA, USA) reported a translational research partnership with Emory University (Atlanta, GA, USA), Winship Cancer Institute (Atlanta, GA, USA), and the Aflac Cancer Center (Atlanta, GA, USA) aimed at using NextBio Clinical to interpret molecular and genomic data from children with medulloblastoma.

This type of brain tumor principally affects children between the ages of five and nine years and accounts for 20% of all brain tumors in children below 19. There is currently no way to predict which patients will develop tumor metastasis. Thus, the widely accepted standard of care is to treat all children suffering from this type of brain cancer with radiation therapy.

“The problem with giving radiation to all children with medulloblastoma is that it causes long term side-effects and toxicity in young growing brains,” said Tobey MacDonald, MD, director, Brain Tumor Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University. He is also the principal investigator of the study and has spent over 10 years of his career working on solving the problem of predicting which children with brain cancer should be treated with radio-therapy while sparing those at low risk of disease spread.

“Emory and the Aflac Cancer Center’s ability to perform genomic studies on patients and then to use NextBio Clinical’s correlation engine to compare the genomic profile of primary tumors with that of metastatic tumors, both across our data and across the large amount of data that NextBio has curated from the public domain, makes achieving our goal of improving outcomes for people with medulloblastoma seem nearer in sight,” Dr. MacDonald concluded.

“NextBio Clinical platform uses a big data technology approach to solve exactly these types of perplexing problems that doctors and researchers have spent years trying to address,” said Alpana Verma-Alag , MD, head of clinical development at NextBio. “This study will look at clinical and genomic data from real patients, as well as data from mouse models and frozen human tissue samples, and then will correlate these data sets with other data from the public domain. Our goal at NextBio has been to not only make this type of study possible but also to make it very easy and efficient to perform. To help change the course of a cancer that largely affects children would be a great accomplishment, and NextBio is very proud to be part of such an effort.”

Related Links:
NextBio
Emory University
Winship Cancer Institute