Dr. Verhaak Discusses Genomic Characterization of Diffuse Lower Grade Gliomas

Roeland GW Verhaak, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Division of Quantitative Sciences, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses a study that examined the comprehensive and integrative genomic characterization of diffuse lower grade gliomas.

Verhaak says this project took nearly 300 tumor samples from patients with lower grade glimoa and performed extensive molecular characterization on these samples. Researchers analyzed the data, searching for subtypes.

An unsupervised analysis showed the same pattern in every data set analyzed, Verhaak says, leading researchers to classify samples into 3 groups: astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, and oligo-astrocytoma.

Verhaak says these 3 groups are important because they share disease biology, which could help researchers in clinical trials. The study also found that one of the groups is wild type for IDH, which is very similar to patients with giloblastomas. Because of this, these lower grade gliomas should be treated like glioblastomas, Verhaak says.

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