Hospitals

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia collaboration aims to develop personalized brain tumor therapies

A collaboration between Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and  Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI that produced the […]

A collaboration between Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and  Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI that produced the Joint Genome Center at the hospital is expanding to include next generation sequencing and analysis of pediatric brain tumors.

The move is intended to support the Childhood Brain Tissue Consortium of which CHOP is a member. It also includes Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Seattle Children’s Hospital and Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The project is intended to ultimately produce more effective forms of therapy for each patient’s specific brain tumor subtype, according to a statement from CHOP.

An estimated 4,300 new cases of childhood primary malignant and non–malignant brain and central nervous system tumors are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2013, according to data from the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States.

The Philadelphia hospital launched the genome center with BGI in November 2011. It forged the partnership to give the hospital the capacity to sequence every child that comes into CHOP. Since the DNA sequence of genomes does not change with age, families will be able to see what diseases they are at risk for, what they may develop when they grow up and become adults in addition to treating more childhood conditions more efficiently.Last summer BGI and CHOP started a program to accelerate the discovery of gene  variants for 1,000 rare diseases to pinpoint the cause of these rare conditions.

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