Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Ewing sarcoma (ES) is a poorly differentiated bone and soft tissue tumor of high metastatic potential. ES mainly affects children, adolescents, and young adults (AYAs) at a frequency of ~1.5 cases per million globally. Ewing neoplasms strikingly converge on a single recurrent initiating event, which is a chromosomal translocation that generates a fusion transcript between the EWSR1 gene and a gene of the ETS family of transcription factors, most commonly FLi1 (85%). After 20 years since the discovery of the EWS-FLi1 fusion, ES remains a clinical challenge with unacceptably low survival rates, primarily due to metastasis. The bulk of research conducted to date (&gt;95%) being focused on the primary tumor has resulted in a critical knowledge gap. To address this issue and unravel the dysregulated pathways in ES tumor evolution and metastatic dissemination, we harnessed the genome-wide insertional mechanism of transposons and the transduction efficiency of lentiviruses to engineer ES cell models. Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC), the putative cells of origin of ES, were engineered to constitutively express EWS-Fli1 accompanied by the inducible expression of a highly active transposase. Upon activation of the former, transposon-mediated mutagenesis will activate oncogenes and inactivate tumor suppressor genes, to mediate transformation of the transduced that can now engraft when implanted in recipient mice. Xenografted tumors are resected and the mice observed for development of distant metastases. Matching primary and metastatic tumors are sequenced to uncover the genes commonly affected by transposition in the two compartments. Pathway-oriented bioinformatic analysis will further reveal candidate metastatic driver genes. Matching of the targeted pathways with drugs will be used to validate the candidates by in vitro and in vivo metastasis assays.</jats:p>
<jats:p>Citation Format: Wajih Jawhar, Paul Waterhouse, Rama Khokha, Takeaki Ishii, Robert Turcotte, Nada Jabado, Livia Garzia. Functional genomics of metastatic Ewing sarcoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on the Advances in Pediatric Cancer Research; 2019 Sep 17-20; Montreal, QC, Canada. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(14 Suppl):Abstract nr A64.</jats:p>