Hunting Rare Cancers to the Ground

Courtesy of Boston Children's Hospital 
As we’ve seen this week on Vector, some rare childhood cancers such as medulloblastoma and neuroblastoma are starting to give up their molecular secrets, raising the possibility (and in medulloblastoma’s case, the reality) of precision treatments. Many cancers, though, are so rare that there aren’t even cell lines in which to study them. Yet they could hold important insights. The first tumor suppressor gene, Rb, was discovered in retinoblastoma, a cancer affecting a mere 500 U.S. children each year.

Doctors often have no clear consensus for diagnosing and treating rare cancers, and outcomes tend to be poor in both children and adults. Andrew Hong, MD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Broad Institute’s Cancer Program and a pediatric oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, is part of a research team that wants to fix that.

Armed with recent advances in culture technology, the scientists aim to engineer cell lines for as many rare cancers as they can get samples for — and then interrogate them for therapeutic targets. A proof-of-concept published in Nature Communications last month finds a lot of potential in their approach. Read more on Broad Minded, the Broad Institute’s science blog.