Fabiana Marcelino Meliso, Christopher G Hubert, Pedro A Favoretto Galante, Luiz O Penalva
Genomic analyses have become an important tool to identify new avenues for therapy. This is especially true for cancer types with extremely poor outcomes since our lack of effective therapies offers no tangible clinical starting point to build upon. The highly malignant brain tumor glioblastoma (GBM) exemplifies such refractory cancer, with only 15-month average patient survival. Analyses of several hundred GBM samples compiled by the TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) have produced an extensive transcriptomic map, identified prevalent chromosomal alterations, and defined important driver mutations. Unfortunately, clinical trials based on these results have not yet delivered an improvement on the outcome. It is, therefore, necessary to characterize other regulatory routes known for playing a role in tumor relapse and response to treatment. Alternative splicing affects more than 90% of the human coding …
