The guidance is meant to help provide the pharma industry, researchers, and IRBs with information to facilitate studies of oncology drugs for pediatric patients.
By looking at genes and pathways with altered expression in tumor samples, researchers uncovered potential treatment targets beyond those provided by tumor DNA testing.
Whether they're analyzing checkpoint inhibitors, CAR T cells, or combination regimens, pediatric cancer researchers must carefully consider which targets and drugs to trial.
At the NCI's Childhood Cancer Data Initiative Symposium, speakers emphasized measures such as data harmonization and the need for longitudinal data collection.
Though some experts prefer the comprehensive nature of whole-genome sequencing, others find whole-exome sequencing or targeted exome panels to be more useful.
St. Jude investigators are sharing their WGS cancer data through the St. Jude Cloud, as well as tools and pipelines to help other researchers analyze and use it.
Combined DNA/RNA-seq efforts in various settings could lead to new ways of treating kids with drugs meant for adults or to the development of new therapies.
At the ACMG meeting, a Children's Hospital of Philadelphia researcher described finding relatively high rates of hereditary cancer variants in tumor sequence data.
