Research

The embryonal tumor neuroblastoma (NB) is derived from the sympathetic nervous system, and is the most common solid tumor in early childhood. Manifestation of NB in early childhood suggests that only a limited number of genetic changes may lead to the transformed phenotype. Thus, the background of genetic expression changes due to environmental factors is reduced to a minimum and the observed genetic anomalies are likely to be of major importance for cancer development. NB provides unique features of tumor biology including a high incidence of spontaneous regression and differentiation. A better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying these features might lead to development of therapies capable of inducing tumor regression and/or differentiation in NB, and other cancer types. NB also demonstrates features of common interest in cancer biology including genetic changes leading to therapy resistance, enhanced tumor angiogenesis, proliferation, invasion and metastasis formation. In addition, NB is an excellent tumor to demonstrate and analyze the importance of oncogenes for tumor development and progression (here: MYCN-amplification). Oncogenes of the MYC-family also play a major role for the development and progression of other tumors, including cancers of the lung, brain, colon, breast, bone and pancreas.

The FRAGILOME project is one of the research directions within the Division of Tumor Genetics, which is studying the special type of genomic instability that is generated by the DNA sequences at fragile-site loci.