The use of gene expression analysis to gain insights into signaling mechanisms of metastatic medulloblastoma

Abstract

Metastasis is the leading cause of treatment failure in medulloblastoma. Understanding the genetic regulation of metastasis may aid in the development of novel treatments. We therefore performed in silico analysis of the mRNA expression of 83 medulloblastomas compiled from two independent microarray studies by focusing on 135 genes most frequently linked to metastasis in other tumors. We then asked whether expression of these genes correlated with metastasis in the medulloblastoma array data sets. We found the platelet-derived growth factor receptor alpha, early growth response protein 1 and insulin-like growth factor 2 genes as well as several genes associated with MYCC and ERBB2 overexpressed by at least 2-fold in metastatic tumors in both array data sets. We conclude that these genes may interact to promote prometastatic signaling in medulloblastoma.