OPTIMUM: a new study of recurrent low grade glioma OPTIMUM Leadership Team
Elizabeth B. Claus, MD, PhD, is a Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics and Neurosurgery, and Director of Medical Research in the School of Public Health at Yale University. Dr Claus is also Attending Neurosurgeon and Director of Stereotactic Radiosurgery in the Department of Neurosurgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Roel Verhaak PhD, is Professor and Associate Director of Computational Biology, The Florine Deschenes Roux Chair for Genomics and Computational Biology, at The Jackson Laboratory in Farmington, Connecticut, USA
ower grade glioma (LGG), a malignant brain tumor, is a disease of young adults for which the optimal treatment remains unknown. This lack of information led Elizabeth B. Claus, M.D., Ph.D., Professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Attending Neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), to begin the International Low-Grade Glioma (LGG) Registry, a global effort to study adult LGG. To date over 400 people with LGG are enrolled, with participants in thirteen countries (including the United States, France, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Belarus, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, India and Spain). In 2021, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded funds to the
LGG Registry to study the evolution or progression of LGG over time. The title of the new project is called “OPTimIzing engageMent in discovery of molecular evolution of low grade glioma” or OPTIMUM. The funding is part of a new National Institutes of Health Cancer Moonshot Initiative called “Patient Engagement and Cancer Genome Sequencing (PE-CGS) Centers." OPTIMUM - led by Dr. Claus along with co-principal investigators (Co-PIs) Dr. Roel Verhaak and Dr. Bethany Kwan - has been named as a PE-CGS Center and includes researchers from the following US institutions: Yale University, The Jackson Laboratory, The University of Colorado, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
L
80
Brain Tumour
Bethany M. Kwan, PhD, MSPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine, The University of Colorado School of Medicine, Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado, USA
What will OPTIMUM do? OPTIMUM will focus on people with recurrent lower grade glioma. Although the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and others have identified consequential genetic alterations in primary LGG tumors, the next step is to understand how gliomas evolve overall and in response to treatment. Longitudinal cohorts of glioma patients are fundamental to producing this knowledge. The largest cohort to date (which primarily includes people with higher grade glioma), the Glioma Longitudinal Analysis (GLASS) lead by Dr. Verhaak, showed that glioma treatment is associated with mutational changes that may affect response to additional therapy and outcome. To better define treatments for low grade glioma the next step is to understand
