New hope for children with brain tumors
Precision medicine — in which diagnosis and treatments are keyed to the genetic susceptibilities of individual cancers — can play a major role in treating children with brain tumors, suggests a study by investigators at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. “Although there has been a great deal of progress over the past 30 years in improving survival rates for children with cancer, advances in pediatric brain cancer haven’t been as dramatic,” says co-lead author Pratiti Bandopadhayay of Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s, who is also an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “In a recent study, brain tumors accounted for 25 percent of all pediatric deaths attributed to cancer. In addition, many of the current therapies can result in long-term difficulties in cognitive or physical functioning,” adds Bandopadhayay. In the largest clinical study to date of genetic abnormalities in pediatric brain tumors, researchers performed clinical testing on more than 200 tumor samples...