Next-Generation Profiling of Medulloblastoma: Old Drugs Are an Elegant Weapon in a Civilized Age.

Abstract

Personalized therapies have remained elusive in medulloblastoma, resulting in treatment paradigms that have been largely stagnant for almost four decades. A recent study by Rusert and colleagues applies a novel integrated approach to the identification of new targets in medulloblastoma by combining genomics, transcriptomics, and high-throughput drug screening across a panel of molecularly characterized patient-derived models. Actinomysin D, a common chemotherapeutic agent, was identified as highly active in the most aggressive form of medulloblastoma, highlighting the power of this approach over genomic paradigms alone.<i>See related article by Rusert et al.; Cancer Res 80(23):5393-407</i>.