Summary

Wiki MarkupThis project is a collaboration between Andrew Trister at Sage Bionetworks and Kristin Swanson at the University of Washington to make measurements of tumor growth kinetics in two modes (diffusion and proliferation) from pretreatment MRIs. Ideally, two pretreatment MRIs with T1+gad and T2 weighted images are used to measure the net proliferation and diffusion rates, and in previous work these measurements have informed characteristics of tumor progression after treatment \ [1\]. They have shown that the ratio of these two can be measured from a single time point image and this is sufficient to discriminate survival. Interestingly, they have measured over two orders of magnitude difference in these parameters among patients, and feel that this demonstrates a significant difference in the underlying biology of individual tumors. They are using the TCGA molecular measurements to investigate the underlying biological perturbations that are driving these different modes of progression.

To this end, they are first investigating correlation between the different subtypes of glioblastoma as described by Verhaak and colleagues and the modes of progression. In parallel, they thought to do a similar analysis with the VASARI Research Project to better understand if there are other sequences on MRI that may be more informative. They will then leverage the expertise at Sage Bionetworks to investigate driver genes as well as to construct network representations of multiple perturbations seen in glioblastoma in an effort to better elucidate changes that may be seen among individual patients.

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