Pediatric brain and spinal cancers are collectively the leading disease-related cause of death in children; thus, we urgently need curative therapeutic strategies for these tumors. To accelerate such ...discoveries, the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) created a systematic process for tumor biobanking, model generation, and sequencing with immediate access to harmonized data. We leverage these data to establish OpenPBTA, an open collaborative project with over 40 scalable analysis modules that genomically characterize 1,074 pediatric brain tumors. Transcriptomic classification reveals universal TP53 dysregulation in mismatch repair-deficient hypermutant high-grade gliomas and TP53 loss as a significant marker for poor overall survival in ependymomas and H3 K28-mutant diffuse midline gliomas. Already being actively applied to other pediatric cancers and PNOC molecular tumor board decision-making, OpenPBTA is an invaluable resource to the pediatric oncology community.
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•OpenPBTA collaborative analyses establish resource for 1,074 pediatric brain tumors•NGS-based WHO-aligned integrated diagnoses generated for 644 of 1,074 tumors•RNA-Seq analysis infers medulloblastoma subtypes, TP53 status, and telomerase activity•OpenPBTA will accelerate therapeutic translation of genomic insights
The OpenPBTA is a global, collaborative open-science initiative that brought together researchers and clinicians to genomically characterize 1,074 pediatric brain tumors and 22 patient-derived cell lines. Shapiro et al. create over 40 open-source, scalable modules to perform cancer genomics analyses and provide a richly annotated somatic dataset across 58 brain tumor histologies. The OpenPBTA framework can be used as a model for large-scale data integration to inform basic research, therapeutic target identification, and clinical translation.
