Experimental models have been extremely useful for learning about cancer and how we might treat it. For brain cancer, however, these models have failed to provide sufficient insight for a breakthrough. This project will use data to help understand what drives brain cancer from models of naturally occurring brain cancer that have never before been explored.

This work could be the beginning of a significant new frontier in brain cancer treatment for children. Striving to treat and cure dogs with cancer, learning what works best and importantly why it works, can inform our own therapy regimens. This provides an important opportunity to improve a child’s brain cancer outcome.

Targeting regions of converging synteny and loss of heterozygosity in paediatric and canine glioma

Brain cancers such as glioma occur in dogs at rates comparable to humans, with short-snouted breeds such as boxers being more susceptible than others. In helping to treat dogs diagnosed with brain cancer, the research team compared the molecular and cellular characteristics of glioma in dogs to their human counterparts and found extensive similarity in particular to aggressive glioma observed in children.

In this project, the team will leverage the similarities between glioma in dogs and in children to further sharpen the lens as to what is causing these cancers. They will mine large datasets on dog and children’s gliomas to precisely define the hundreds of molecular abnormalities found in both disease types. The team will perform a large screen and functionally eliminate each molecular abnormality one by one and evaluate the effects of this depletion on cancer-associated features such as cell growth in human and canine cell models of glioma. This advanced screen is enabled by the versatile and cutting-edge imaging platform and computational expertise at the Jackson Laboratory.

The team expects to see convergence of the most impactful molecular abnormalities on brain cancer’s evolutionary mechanisms, which will implicate that these mechanisms are candidates for the development of new treatments.