Improving our understanding of brain tumours in teenagers and young adults

Teenagers and young adults (TYA) 13-25 years of age are making the transition from childhood to adulthood, marked with profound physiological, psychological and social change. If the burden of brain cancer is added, it becomes an extraordinarily challenging time in their growth and development.

TYA are unique in the types of cancers that they develop and neither pediatric nor adult-treating oncologists are fully comfortable in managing these. TYAs are often lost in a health-care system that concentrates on pediatric and adult cancers. Among cancers, tumours of the central nervous system (CNS) are the fourth most common cancers in TYA, and their incidence is increasing in UK. Despite constituting only 14% of total cancers in TYA, CNS tumours are the most common cause of cancer-related death in this age group. This has been attributed to various factors including no or few clinical trials conducted in TYA with CNS cancers, the dearth of specific treatment guidelines, and delays in diagnosis and treatment. There has been a remarkable progress made in the treatment of CNS cancers in both pediatric and adult population. However, this progress has not been shared equally across the TYA realm. One explanation for the relative lack of progress is that the biology of malignant diseases in this age group is different than in younger and older persons.

This study aims to comprehensively characterize the biology of CNS tumours in TYA using data obtained from modern genomic technologies. We will compare the TYA with other age groups in order to ultimately improve our understanding of cancer biology. The proposed study is the first ever to systematically study CNS cancers in TYA at molecular level, and is expected to provide an unparalleled view of underlying TYA biology, which could lead to new treatment approaches being developed based on this new knowledge.