Abstract
Current treatment strategies for children with brain tumors focus on improving outcome for tumor types that have historically been relatively resistant to therapy, and reducing treatment-related sequelae for children with therapy-responsive tumors. Refinements in clinical and molecular stratification for many types of childhood brain tumors have facilitated these efforts to achieve risk-adapted treatment planning. In some instances, molecular characterization approaches have also yielded insights into new therapeutic targets. This chapter reviews advances in stratification approaches for several of the most common types of childhood brain tumors, including high- and low-grade gliomas, medulloblastomas and other primitive neuroectodermal tumors (PNETs), and infant brain tumors, and discusses how new information regarding the biological features critical to tumorigenesis is being translated into novel therapeutic approaches for these challenging tumors.
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This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants P01NS40923 and R01NS37704.
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Pollack, I.F. (2012). Pediatric Brain Tumors: Application of Stratification Criteria to Refine Patient Management. In: Hayat, M. (eds) Pediatric Cancer, Volume 2. Pediatric Cancer, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2957-5_21
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