Funded by the 2015 V Foundation Wine Celebration Fund a Need, including $50,000 donated by the National Brain Tumor Society.
Children with high-grade gliomas continue to have a dismal prognosis, specifically when the tumor is located within the brainstem. Most children die from this disease and no significant change in outcome has been achieved over the last several decades. To improve the poor prognosis for these children, we will apply a precision medicine approach, which has never been explored in a comprehensive fashion for children with this diagnosis. We will conduct the trial through the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology consortium (PNOC). PNOC consists of 11 premier Children’s Hospitals within the US that all have internationally recognized brain tumor programs. We will profile each child’s tumor with state of the art next generation sequencing and determine a treatment plan based on the specific characteristics of the tumor. This precision medicine trial will answer if this approach results in clinical benefit. Additionally we will be able to address the question: if treatment fails, why it fails. To study this we will take biopsies from different parts of the tumor and assess if there are regional differences in the tumor’s genetic make-up, and compare molecular profiles of newly diagnosed and recurrent tumors. We will develop cell lines and animal models for each tumor that will be made available for preclinical testing to further explore mechanisms of treatment failure. Results of this trial may change how we approach these tumors and lay the groundwork for the next set of clinical trials for these children as these technologies continue to develop.
