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Landscapes of childhood tumours

Two analyses of the genetic alterations that characterize paediatric cancers reveal key differences from adult cancers, and point to ways of optimizing therapeutic approaches to combating cancer in children.
  1. Pratiti Bandopadhayay

    1. Pratiti Bandopadhayay is in the Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA, and at the Broad Institute of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, Boston.

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  2. Matthew Meyerson

    1. Matthew Meyerson is in the Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA, and at the Broad Institute of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, Boston.

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The mapping of the human genome, followed by the explosion in next-generation genome sequencing, has revolutionized our understanding of cancer. These advances have paved the way for precision-medicine approaches to treating adult cancers. Two papers in Nature report the first pan-cancer genomic analyses in children. In the first, Gröbner et al.1 analysed sequences of whole exomes (all the protein-coding regions in the genome) or whole genomes for 961 cancers across 24 tumour types, with an emphasis on tumours of the central nervous system. In the second, Ma et al.2 used similar analyses to characterize 1,699 cancers across 6 types of cancer tissue, particularly leukaemias. The findings provide valuable insights into the mechanisms that shape the genomes of childhood cancers.

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Nature 555, 316-317 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-01648-4

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