Research Projects

Sarcomas represent the second most common type of solid tumors in children and adolescents. Despite the multi-modality approach for treating pediatric sarcomas, clinical outcomes for these patients remain suboptimal due to refractoriness/relapse of disease by various molecular alterations. Therefore it is important to recognize predictive bio-markers of chemotherapeutic response in these pediatric sarcoma patients to improve prognosis and clinical outcomes. DNA methylation is an important epigenetic modification regulating gene expression. The biological significance of epigenetic alterations highly depends on the tissue microenvironment and widespread interactions. This study will investigate methylation alterations to determine if they can be used as predictive biomarkers of therapeutic response in pediatric sarcoma. In this study, methylation alterations that may serve as prognostic biomarkers for pediatric sarcomas will be investigated using EPIC-array to determine if they can be used as predictive biomarkers of therapeutic response.