Dissecting rare gliomas

In an April Science study, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School identified a subpopulation of malignant cells driving disease progression in rare pediatric gliomas with mutated histone H3 K27M using single-cell RNA sequencing analysis, thereby revealing novel pathways that could be targeted to treat the disease.

Study author Mario Suvà told BioCentury that unlike shotgun metagenomic sequencing, which analyzes cells in bulk and is not sensitive enough to distinguish between cell types, single-cell RNA sequencing enabled the team to characterize individual cell types. Suvà is an assistant professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and assistant molecular pathologist at Mass General...