In an incerdible development, ABC2 and CureSearch for Children's Cancer have jointly funded a supplement to the our international collaboration entitled, "Rapid Preclinical Development of a Targeted Therapy Combination for DIPG". The two new sponsor partners provide $76,000 and $25,000, respectively, for a total of $101,000. Their new supplement will allow us to exon sequencing of all 16 cell lines, their primary tumor and paired normal DNA via the laboratory of Dr. Paul Spellman (OHSU; see his recent functional genomics paper here). From this data we will prioritize combination drug testing on the most clinically ‘representative’ samples (i.e., samples that have classical DIPG findings which are in order: c‐MET amplification, p53 deletion, PDGFRA amplification, IGF1R/IGF2 amplification, CDK4/CDK6 gain or Shh pathway mutation, EGFR amplification or KRAS/NRAS mutation) or cell lines that are most similar overall to one another (i.e., not outliers).This project is more fully described here and here. This study was originally made possible by a $100,000 grant from TheCureStartsNow. An additional $28,000 supplement from The Lyla Nsouli Foundation for Children’s Brain Cancer Research further allowed our project to expand to the 2 participating European collaborators. The new $101,000 from ABC2 and CureSearch for Children's Cancer adds significant new scope to this endeavor. The interesting aspect is that a large part of the new scope was envisioned by our ABC2 partner's scientific advisory board - an example of the value of scientific and strategic partnership.
