Molecular subgroups of medulloblastoma: an international meta-analysis of transcriptome, genetic aberrations, and clinical data of WNT, SHH, Group 3, and Group 4 medulloblastomas

By M. Kool, A. Korshunov, M. Remke, David T. W. Jones, Maria Schlanstein, P. Northcott, Yoon-Jae Cho, J. Koster, A. Meeteren, D. Vuurden and 17 more. Acta Neuropathologica, 2012

976 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in childhood. Molecular studies from several groups around the world demonstrated that medulloblastoma is not one disease but comprises a collection of distinct molecular subgroups. However, all these studies reported on different numbers of subgroups. The current consensus is that there are only four core subgroups, which should be termed WNT, SHH, Group 3 and Group 4. Based on this, we performed a meta-analysis of all molecular and clinical data of 550 medulloblastomas brought together from seven independent studies. All cases were analyzed by gene expression profiling and for most cases SNP or array-CGH data were available. Data are presented for all medulloblastomas together and for each subgroup separately. For validation purposes, we compared the results of this meta-analysis with another large medulloblastoma cohort (n = 402) for which subgroup information was obtained by immunohistochemistry. Results from both cohorts are highly similar and show how distinct the molecular subtypes are with respect to their transcriptome, DNA copy-number aberrations, demographics, and survival. Results from these analyses will form the basis for prospective multi-center studies and will have an impact on how the different subgroups of medulloblastoma will be treated in the future.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce50e39fc940b4d1eb966e9f11fde456f504c4e8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cancer Research

In Genetics

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Genome Sequencing of SHH Medulloblastoma Predicts Genotype-Related Response to Smoothened Inhibition (2014, background): “whereas in children (4–17 years old) other subgroups are more prevalent (Kool et al., 2012).”
Molecular subgroups of medulloblastoma: the current consensus (2011, methodology): “…to identify target cohorts for certain drugs (e.g., SHH inhibitors), but also add signiﬁcantly to outcome prediction by the time of diagnosis [21], much more than any of the established clinical markers such as patient age, metastatic stage at diagnosis, level of resection, and histological…”
Molecular Classification of Ependymal Tumors across All CNS Compartments, Histopathological Grades, and Age Groups. (2015, background): “A robust and uniform (epi)genetic classification of ependymal tumors as presented herein may guide researchers, neuropathologists, and clinicians to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of this disease, analogous to (epi)genetic subgroups of medulloblastoma (Kool et al., 2012; Northcott et al”