Which clinical centres are involved in the paediatric clinical study?
For the paediatric part of GLIOMATCH, University Hospital Leuven works together with Uppsala University in Sweden and the cancer research centre Sant Joan de Déu, located in Barcelona, Spain (see also clinical trials page).
Together, these centres contribute expertise and patient material for the paediatric clinical study, which focuses on paediatric high-grade gliomas.
What challenges do you face as part of the paediatric clinical study?
For the paediatric part of GLIOMATCH, the team will mainly focus on the retrospective study. This means that the researchers will look at old archived samples from paediatric high-grade glioma patients.
Prof. Dr. Sandra Jacobs explains that paediatric high-grade gliomas are often located in the brain stem. One of the major challenges is that the available biopsies are usually very small. This makes it difficult to obtain good quality material for the spatial omics analyses planned in the project.
How is clinical data collected?
Clinical data will be collected from patient files in the three participating centres. The teams will identify and collect the clinical data needed for the study and correlate this information with the tissue available from the patients.
This combination of clinical information and tissue analysis is central to understanding paediatric high-grade gliomas in more detail and linking patient data with the spatial omics results generated in the project.
What are the main goals of the paediatric clinical trial?
The main goal of the paediatric clinical study is to obtain more knowledge about spatial omics in paediatric high-grade glioma. This information is expected to help guide the development of new treatments for these patients.
By studying archived samples and linking them with clinical data, the GLIOMATCH team aims to better understand the biology of paediatric high-grade gliomas and support future research into improved therapeutic approaches.
Watch the video episode and discover the full GLIOMATCH: Explained series on our video page.
