EPEN-47. PEDS: PEDIATRIC EPENDYMOMA DISCOVERY STUDY

The prognosis for pediatric ependymoma remains unaffected by recent discovery. Upfront therapy is maximal surgical resection followed by radiation and the utility of histologic diagnosis remains unreliable. Nine molecular subgroups and possible genetic drivers of ependymoma have been identified, but the implementation of these findings into targeted therapy and stratified clinical trials has not occurred. It is imperative that researchers work collaboratively to move discovery towards clinical testing. Heterogeneity of ependymoma requires that we collect a large amount of data; progress in the field is dependent on deep analysis of this information. As we further subclassify ependymoma, it will be important to have a large patient population for enrollment onto clinical trials, which will maximize data collection and the amount of materials available for experimentation and analysis. Researchers in the United States, Europe, and Japan propose an international ependymoma research collaborative which aims to synthesize research across sites, foster drug discovery, and prove strategies to integrate clinical and molecular diagnostics into biology-based therapy. Our goal is to maximize information and materials from existing bio and data repositories and not to ‘re-create the wheel’. We envision PEDS as an open science platform and present this concept at ISPNO to invite our colleagues to harmonize efforts towards pediatric ependymoma discovery.