St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Scientists at St. Jude have published the most comprehensive analysis of medulloblastoma treatment to date, drawing on clinical, molecular and survival data from almost 900 patients treated across three clinical trials. Their work addresses the challenge of medulloblastoma’s molecular variability, which has historically made it difficult to tailor treatment intensity to minimize long-term side-effects for pediatric patients.
By harmonizing clinical trial data and molecular features, such as DNA sequences, methylation profiles and chromosomal changes, researchers identified new risk groups that enable more precise treatment recommendations. For patients whose tumors fall into the two most common molecular groups (G3 or G4), further stratification by chromosomal alterations, methylation subgroup, and oncogene MYC amplification led to four actionable risk categories. This approach enables nearly 40% of patients to receive lower doses of craniospinal radiation and less chemotherapy, while maintaining the same or better survival outcomes.
“Medulloblastoma is highly variable and can be divided into many different subcategories, so it has been unclear which factors are the most crucial for classifying patients into different treatment groups,” said Giles Robinson, MD, director of the Division of Neuro-oncology. “Our results provide a blueprint to better risk-stratify therapy so that not everyone receives such toxic treatment and only the most aggressive tumors receive the most aggressive therapy.”
To facilitate clinical decision-making, the scientists developed the Medulloblastoma Meta-Analysis (MB-meta) Portal, an online tool that allows users to explore predicted survival based on selected demographic, clinical and molecular features.
“We created the portal so anyone can perform a simple point-and-click, choosing variables to generate predicted survival curves for patients with medulloblastoma,” said Xin Zhou, PhD, Department of Computational Biology.
The portal also enables further research into novel molecular subgroups and potential new treatment strategies.
Together, these studies represent a significant step forward in personalized medicine for pediatric brain tumors, with the potential to improve survivors’ quality of life and guide future clinical trials.
Learn more about these findings.”
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