Identification of novel predictive biomarkers and molecular targets in pediatric ependymoma

Ependymoma remains a significant clinical challenge in pediatric neurooncology, since a subgroup of patients experience multiple relapses and ultimately die from disease. The molecular pathogenesis of ependymoma initiation and progression is still largely unknown, and accordingly, no molecular markers to facilitate identification of such poor-risk patients have reached the level of clinical application to date. To identify novel candidate biomarkers, we combined genome-wide mRNA expression profiling (Agilent 44k technology) with array-CGH (10k BAC arrays) in primary tumor samples from 78 patients with a median f…