Heidelberg's Hopp Children's Cancer Center Launches Global Initiative to Expand Access to Methylation-Based Tumor Classification

The Hopp Children's Cancer Center Heidelberg in Germany has initiated an alliance aimed at expanding the use of methylation-based tumor classification methods to help children in low-income countries gain better access to diagnosis.

Under the leadership of pediatric oncologist Pfister, who is developing methods to distinguish central nervous system tumors using methylation array data, Hope collaborates with the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD), and Illumina, Inc. to provide training for laboratories worldwide and fund them in conducting this test in their own countries. The German non-profit organization Ein Herz für Kinder (A Heart for Children) provides financial support to help train healthcare providers and laboratory staff.

To date, the program has trained 37 personnel from laboratories in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, and South Africa.

As part of the program, Illumina will donate reagents for testing at the participants' institutions and provide expert knowledge and technical support for the testing. It is currently unclear how long the program will last and the value of the reagents.

"There are many types of childhood cancers, so the responses to radiotherapy and chemotherapy vary greatly," Pfister said. "Therefore, it is crucial to classify tumors as precisely as possible for effective treatment, and this differentiation method applies to sarcomas and central nervous system tumors."

The program may also provide new insights into methylation patterns in populations that are underrepresented in research.

Pfister's team first published a paper on this detection method in the journal *Nature* in 2018 [1]. It uses the Illumina methylation array to analyze samples and employs machine learning methods for classification. In a prospective study, the researchers applied it to 1,155 central nervous system tumors, with all but 51 cases characterized, and 977 cases classified based on methylation.