Genome wide studies of primary brain cancers.

摘要

Primary brain tumors such as glioblastomas and meningiomas are the most frequently diagnosed cancers of the central nervous system. Survival rates from glioblastomas and malignant meningiomas have shown little improvement as standard of care therapies for both neoplasias have been largely ineffective. Affymetrix Human Genome U133A and U133 Plus 2.0 expression arrays were utilized to determine the main cause for the beneficial survival effect of younger age observed in glioblastoma patients. Affymetrix Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 expression arrays and Affymetrix GeneChipRTM Human Mapping 100k arrays were also used in concert to identify chromosomal arm losses associated with clinical covariates and gene expression subtypes in meningiomas. The results of the glioblastoma studies revealed that the predominant cause for the beneficial age effect in GBM patients was due to the higher frequency of patients younger than age 40 being diagnosed with the ProNeural types of GBMs relative to the Proliferative, Mesenchymal, or Proliferative-Mesenchymal types of GBMs. The results of the meningioma studies identified a hierarchy of chromosome loss patterns associated with grade, five expression based subtypes correlated with grade, a higher prevalence of chromosome 18q loss in females of a particular subtype, and genes uniquely expressed in meningiomas versus normal body tissues and gliomas.