Scientists Create Open-Source Platform to Analyze Brain Tumors in Kids

Every year, around 2,200 children and adolescents in the United States receive brain tumor diagnoses. Brain tumors rarely occur in these age groups, and most children and adolescents diagnosed with brain tumors grow into adulthood. However, even though pediatric brain tumors are relatively rare, they are among the leading causes of death in children in the country. Furthermore, even less deadly brain tumor variants with longer survival rates negatively affect the diagnosed children and their families.

As such, researchers are constantly working on better diagnosing, analyzing and treating brain tumors to improve treatment outcomes even further. Recent efforts by a multi-institutional team of researchers have resulted in the creation of the first-of-its-kind reproducible analysis platform to analyze pediatric brain tumors.

Researchers from the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBNT), the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC), the Alex’s Lemondate Stand Foundation Childhood Cancer Data Lab along with more than 20 other institutions teamed up to create the analysis platform.

After feeding thousands of genomic-sequenced samples into the platform for analysis, the research team was able to find genetic variants that tend to increase poorer health outcomes. The findings, which were reported in the “Cell Genomics” online journal, may be helpful in future advances in pediatric brain tumor diagnosis and treatment.

Scientists have struggled to understand the molecular differences between different types of pediatric brain tumors due to the limited supply of tissue samples and patient-derived cell lines for research. Experts say gaining access to this data could allow researchers and clinicians to develop better means of diagnosing pediatric cancer as well as targeted therapies to kill pediatric cancer cells.

The Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network began collecting tumor samples in 2011 and have managed to extract close to 6,000 tumor samples and more than 68,000 subsamples. Researchers were given free access to the data to allow them to determine which variants were responsible for which types of brain tumors.

Their efforts resulted in the completion of an open-source platform called the Open Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas (OpenPBTA) to completely analyze the brain tumor data. The research team has made OpenPBTA available to any researcher seeking novel therapeutic targets or ways to leverage the research in everyday clinical practice.

Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation coexecutive director Jay Scott said that the platform brought together experts from around the world and provided them with a tool to study pediatric brain cancer and completely uncover its underlying mechanisms.

This breakthrough platform adds onto the brain cancer research that for-profit entities such as CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are doing to advance the field of brain cancer treatment and management.

NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/CNSP

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