Tumors are never something to joke around about; they are
dangerous, unpredictable, and they can even be fatal. They can appear nearly
anywhere in the human body, at basically any point in time. In fact, one of the most
dangerous habitats for a tumor is the brain. A complicated and mysterious part
of the human body already, the brain controls almost everything, and a tumor
appearing in this region can be devastating. They are difficult to remove, and
they can have disastrous mental and physical consequences. Even worse, they can
present themselves at any age. This makes children susceptible, and what could
be worse than that? With around 1,500 children diagnosed a year, pediatric
brain tumors are not the most common cause of death in children (1). However,
they are the most common type of pediatric tumor, and they have the highest
mortality rate over all other childhood cancers. Despite its reputation, this
deadly disease has had no improvements regarding treatment methods in the past.
Until recently even, the standard treatment was radiation exposure and
chemotherapy, which were often coupled with horrible, debilitating side effects.
Now, a new form of treatment has been devised due to its tumor specificity –
immunotherapy.
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| "Types of Brain and Spinal Cord Tumors in Children." Johns Hopkins Medicine. Johns Hopkins University, Hospital, and Health System, 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. |
Studies have shown that there have
been positive correlations between host immunity and survival rate in children
diagnosed with brain tumors. Still, immunotherapy has demonstrated to be
largely ineffective due to the immunosuppression induced by brain tumors
because it tampers with the immune system-supressing qualities of the exogenous
therapy. Several scientists researched pediatric brain tumor types further,
however, in order to better understand immunophenotypes – the immunological
characteristics – of these tumors. They hoped to shed some light on the subject
in order to be able to better treat these afflicted children and give them more
of a fighting chance.
In
Andrea Griesinger and her colleagues’ study, they measured the phenotype and
frequency of tumor-infiltrating leukocytes in the four most common types of
child brain tumors*(4). They began by surgically taking tumor samples from
forty-two patients at the Children’s Hospital in Colorado; they also took five
non-tumor samples for a control group. Then, the tissue samples were disaggregated and frozen, before
they were eventually suspended, stained, and analyzed via a FACS analysis and a
gene expression analysis (2, 3). The FACS analysis then sorted the variety of
cells into two or more containers based on their fluorescence while the gene
expression analysis quantified the expression levels of certain genes.
