Clinical biomarkers in central nervous system tumors

Abstract

Harmful and damaging effects on global chromatin and epigenomic pattern, gene expression, and cellular phenotype has been known to be associated with cancer. The post genome-wide association studies era offers a blueprint for investigating genomics, epigenomics, and transcriptomics information together, providing us an exciting opportunity to enlighten how complex diseases develop at the whole genome level. Recurrent gliomas and meningiomas are tumors that develop in the central nervous system (CNS) and commonly exhibit failure of the gold standard therapy and unfavorable patient clinical outcome. DNA methylation changes chart the epigenome of distinct CNS tumor types. Molecular taxonomy defined by epigenome-wide studies can recapitulate abnormalities that are inherent to the epigenome of recurrent and aggressive neoplastic cells. In this proposal, our primary goal is to characterize DNA methylation alterations as leading candidates for the development of prognostication biomarkers in aggressive recurrent gliomas and meningiomas. (AU)