OpenPBTA: The Open Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas

Pediatric brain and spinal cancers are collectively the leading disease-related cause of death in children; thus, we urgently need curative therapeutic strategies for these tumors. To accelerate such discoveries, the Chil-dren's Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) created a sys-tematic process for tumor biobanking, model generation, and sequencing with immediate access to harmo-nized data. We leverage these data to establish OpenPBTA, an open collaborative project with over 40 scalable analysis modules that genomically characterize 1,074 pediatric brain tumors. Transcriptomic classi-fication reveals universal TP53 dysregulation in mismatch repair-deficient hypermutant high-grade gliomas and TP53 loss as a significant marker for poor overall survival in ependymomas and H3 K28-mutant diffuse midline gliomas. Already being actively applied to other pediatric cancers and PNOC molecular tumor board decision-making, OpenPBTA is an invaluable resource to the pediatric oncology community.