Team uses NGS to identify new medulloblastoma targets

In a paper published in Nature, researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, German Cancer Research Center, and other institutions identified new driver mutations from a next-generation sequencing study of patients with medulloblastoma, suggesting the genes could be targeted to treat the pediatric malignant brain cancer.

The researchers collected tumor samples from 579 untreated patients with the disease and performed NGS on 491 samples with matched normal samples. The researchers also performed epigenetic analysis on 1,256 samples. The samples were divided into known molecular subgroups of medulloblastoma exhibiting distinctive transcriptional and epigenetic signatures that define clinically relevant patient subsets. Across all subgroups, the researchers analyzed over 440,000 somatic mutations and identified 24 molecular signatures, including signatures not previously detected in medulloblastoma...