Beers help lead to Toronto breakthrough in childhood cancer research


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Beers help lead to Toronto breakthrough in childhood brain tumour research

September 7, 2010

JOSEPH HALL

HEALTH REPORTER

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Taylor, a pediatric brain surgeon at Sick Kids, says medulloblastoma studies have been hampered in the past by a famously ?distrustful? culture among neuro-oncologists, which saw researchers horde their tumour samples, restricting the number available to their colleagues.

?But everybody likes Canadians right, and everybody trusts us and we?re not threatening,? he says. ?So I actually managed, by chatting everybody up and buying them beers, to get people from all over the world, from 45 different centres . . . to send me all their tumours.?

Taylor says he usually asks ?after the third beer.?

Thus, rather than the typical 10 or 20 tumours available for most medulloblastoma studies, Taylor?s team had access to some 1,200 biopsies.

Training some potent new genomic scanners on the tumour DNA, Sick Kids researchers were able to distinguish four different age- and sex-related brands, each with a different severity and potential treatment.

?So even though they look the same under the microscope, when you look at the genes that are turned on and turned off and the genes that are mutated, they?re different in the four groups.?

One form of the disease primarily affects babies, one girls, another boys and a fourth runs the gamut of age and sex.

The type that most commonly affects girls, at about a three to one ratio, has a 90 per cent survival rate.

?On the other side of the coin, one of the other types of medulloblastoma that affects boys more commonly has a survival rate of close to zero.?

?So what can we learn from that? Well, first of all, we know that they?re different diseases and we?re probably going to have to treat them differently.?

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http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/familyhealth/article/857674--beers-help-lead-to-toronto-breakthrough-in-childhood-brain-tumour-research

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