As pediatric brain and spinal cord tumors are the leading disease-related cause of death in children, we urgently need novel, curative therapeutic strategies for these tumors. To accelerate such discoveries, the Children's Brain Tumor Network and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium created a systematic process for tumor biobanking, model generation, and sequencing while providing immediate access to harmonized data. Here, we leverage these data to create OpenPBTA, an open and collaborative project to genomically characterize and molecularly subtype pediatric brain tumor specimens in what is, to our knowledge, the largest cohort of such samples to date. OpenPBTA establishes over 40 scalable analysis modules to analyze these data and recapitulate key oncogenic drivers across histologies. OpenPBTA has already emerged as a foundational analysis platform actively being applied to study other pediatric cancers and inform molecular tumor board decision-making, making it an invaluable resource to the pediatric oncology community.
pediatric brain tumors, somatic variation, open science, reproducibility, classification