n known as Sonic Hedgehog, which is supposed to be turned off after it performs its crucial functions during fetal brain developing. Pomeroys study confirms other work in fruit flies and humans implicating mutations in the Hedgehog signaling pathway as responsible for turning normal cerebellum into cancerous cells.

"The new work is an exciting example of how useful genomic studies can be to classify different tumor types, to arrive at a prognosis using gene activities in tumor cells, and to identify relationships between normal cells and tumor cells," says Matthew Scott, a developmental biologist at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute whose research group linked the Hedgehog signaling pathway to medulloblastoma.

The study is part of a cluster of recent papers from a group of Boston researchers from several research centers applying new genomic tools to cancer. It turns out that simultaneous measurement of thousands of genes expressed in a tumor sample may help explain why some people respond to cancer treatments and others dont. Also known as "transcriptional profiling," the new techniques may provide a more reliable diagnosis. It may uncover previously unrecognized kinds of cancer and provide new discovery tools to explore and ultimately to interfere with the basic machinery of cancer. Some of the studies are so preliminary that biological meaning is still largely conjecture; others serve up good possibilities for imminent clinical testing.

This study is particularly interesting because researchers couldnt find the signature patterns by simpler cluster analysis methods. So, Pomeroy and his colleagues developed a pattern recognition algorithm that "trained" a powerful computer to learn the difference between patients who survived and those who didnt.

"The bottom line is that there exists a gene expression signature of outcome in childhood medulloblastoma, and this signature is detectable
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Contact: Bess Andrews
elizabeth.andrews@TCH.Harvard.edu
617-355-6420
Harvard Medical School
24-Jan-2002

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